Fear + Intimidation Does Not = Leadership

Several years ago, while I was directing the public relations (PR) activities for a Utah based PR agency, my boss came in and asked me if I thought my team was afraid of me. I gave her a quizzical look and quickly replied that I sincerely hoped they weren’t.

She proceeded to tell me that the team wasn’t afraid of me and then tried to explain to me why that was a problem for me. She rationalized to me, that if the team wasn’t afraid of me, they would never get things completed the way they needed to be done.

As we debated this topic and I defended my position that fear and intimidation didn’t always equate to effective leadership or improved results, she said she could prove her standpoint. She proceeded to have me follow her down to the office managers office. Our office manager was a retired Marine Master Sargent. He ran the office like he ran his teams in the Marine Corps for 26 years and was a no-nonsense guy that said what he meant and meant what he said.

When we got to his office, my boss asked him if he thought my team respected me. He quickly responded that, “Yes, the team loves working for Jeremy.” Deflated, our discussion ended temporarily. I say temporarily because as I recounted the experience to my wife later that night I told her that by tomorrow, my boss would come back with a counter argument so she could prove her point.

Sure enough, as I arrived at work the next day, my boss greeted me with round two. This time she said she had personally interviewed each member of my team and it was unanimous that they weren’t afraid of me. Later that day as I talked to various members of my team, it became evident that she hadn’t talked to anybody and had made up her one-on-one discussions with them. In fact, a couple of them caught wind of what she had said from other sources and without prompting from me, volunteered to let me use them as an example and help my cause.

I appreciated, but declined their offers. This experience served as a good reminder of the leadership characteristics I look for in a leader and that I feel have made me an effective leader over the course of my career.

Build Trust

I believe in getting to know each individual member of my teams on a personal level. It’s not something I force because I’m their leader, but something I like to do. I enjoy getting to know new people and understanding what their interests are outside of work, their career goals and what makes them tick. It sounds cliché, but everybody has a story and I love discovering these stories.  Doing this is also a highly effective way to build trust.

From a leadership perspective, knowing these types of details can help you gain a deeper understanding for what motivates them and know how to work with them more effectively. In one instance, I knew a member of one of my teams was deeply committed to his young daughter. In talking to him, he told me that he wanted to be there for certain events and activities. He explained that growing up his father worked such long hours that he wasn’t able to attend many of his activities. He wanted to be different than his father and make it so that his daughter would never be wondering if he would show up or be in attendance for activities she thought important.

Knowing this, I made it clear to him that as these events came up, if he let me know in advance, I would make sure he had the time he needed to participate in and experience these activities with his daughter.

Set the Vision

If nobody knows what the vision is, they’ll have no way of knowing what their role is or how they can contribute to success. An effective vison will help identify goals for achieving the vision and establishing roles for each team member to contribute to the success and realization of these goals.

In my experience, once the team buys into the vision, they’ll start to take ownership of their role and find creative and innovative ways of getting to where you want to be. In one memorable example, when I first started working with FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention, we knew we needed to educate the media and general public about what a fan convention like this is. The vast majority of media had never heard of a comic con or fan convention of this type and as a result were uncertain about how to cover it. Similarly, the general public were unfamiliar as well.

Understanding the vision of the founders, I took the public relations component and recommended something that had never been done before to our knowledge. I arranged for celebrity attendees to do pre-event interviews over the phone and in person a few days before the convention started. I also recommended we do a kickoff press conference and invite celebrities to attend and do media interviews. I told the founders it would be much like Super Bowl media day. Both recommendations were incredibly successful.

Lou Ferrigno who played the Hulk on the original TV series The Incredible Hulk came out a few days in advance and did interviews with every local media outlet. After the show he told FanX founders that in more than 20 years of doing these fan conventions he had never had a more successful event or made more money than he did at FanX. The following year, the agent for Barbara Eden, the actress that played Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie called and asked me to do for Barbara what I had done for Lou the previous year.

Similarly, the kickoff press conference was a smashing success. We had more than 150 media attend and 12-15 celebrities that did interviews for an hour before the show opened. Word spread among the comic con circuit and now just about every comic con in America copies FanX and does a kickoff press conference.

Trust and Empower Your Teams

Nobody likes to be micromanaged or have every decision and move they make questioned or evaluated by their boss.  I had a colleague years ago that I assigned to work with the agency owner on a number of accounts. I placed him on these accounts due to previous experience that tied in nicely with these accounts.

After a few weeks I met with him to catch up and see how he was transitioning into the accounts and the agency. As we met, he was excited about the agency, specifically his colleagues and the culture. As we discussed the accounts, he had some concerns. It turns the agency owner told him to take the lead on these accounts and to just run with things. He told her what his strategy was and she gave him the green light. As he began executing on his strategy, she lurked in the background constantly questioning him and second guessing his work. The client was excited by results but the agency owner clearly didn’t trust him. As a result, he found himself constantly looking over his shoulder and doubting his every move. He was miserable.

Check Your Ego At The Door

I worked for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Olympic Winter Games of 2002 (SLOC). I was fortunate to work closely with Mitt Romney. I learned from Mitt that you don’t have to know everything to be the CEO or a true leader. He used to say all the time that he wasn’t the expert or most knowledgeable person in every aspect of the Olympics. He was however, smart enough to hire the best and most talented people.

He would ask questions to understand people’s recommendations and challenge them in an effort to poke holes in or find weaknesses, but he wasn’t concerned with being right all the time. His main priority was finding the right answer, not proving his answer was the best. He was confident in himself and his role that he didn’t need to prove himself the smartest person or the one that always came up with the best idea.

These four leadership characteristics have served me well over the course of my career. What qualities do you like in the leaders in your life?