Strong Leaders

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I usually write on diverse topics such as: Product Management, Data Science, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership. This article is part of a series of articles on leadership. Being a strong leader is about many things, but none more important than emotional intelligence. I have written a detailed blog on emotional intelligence, which is yet to be published, but today I am going to focus on the decision-making ability of a leader and how emotions and intuition play a role.

The business world is complex and fast-moving. Deep, rational thinking may sometimes be a luxury that a leader cannot always afford. Strong leaders make quick decisions under extreme pressure and it might seem like a gut-feeling or random decision. It may almost feel like they are being impulsive, but that is not the case. Conditions under which leaders have to make decisions sometimes preclude the use of rational analysis. Their information may be limited or the pressure of time forces them to make quick judgments. There are limits to rationality and many psychologists believe that much of the cognition occurs in a realm of intuition outside the norms of consciousness.

My colleagues always ask me how I make such risky decisions so quickly, and I tell them that it comes with experience. Now that I am in my mid-thirties, I have been in senior leadership positions and led companies and products for quite a long time. Over time I have made many critical decisions and developed an intuitive process which helps me make quicker decisions; they might seem like gut decisions but they in fact are not. You develop an intuitive process for recognizing patterns and seeing through the missing information. Intuition is a composite phenomenon involving interplay between knowing (intuition-as-expertise) and sensing (intuition-as-feeling). As a leader, you are going to make 10 decisions a day and all you can do is hope that you make more right ones than wrong, and that the net result is positive. You cannot let the fear of making wrong decisions slow you.

When it comes down to it, it is the tenacity, grit, optimism, and the ability to fail-up that differentiates a leader from a non-leader. I will now restate the list compiled by Amy Morin, a psychotherapist, but add my thoughts and personal experience on each of the traits strong leaders need to possess/ get rid of to be successful.

1. Wasting Time Feeling Sorry for Themselves – Strong leaders know that life is not fair and do not dwell upon variables which they have no control on. They do not spent time feeling sorry for themselves because of how they were treated. They accept the results of their actions and are always willing to move on.
2. Give Away Their Power – Like my grandfather always used to say “Never let anyone or anything have so much power on you that they can hurt you”. Strong leaders take control of a situation and never let their emotions get in the way.
3. Shying Away from Change – The biggest fear of strong leaders is not change, but being stuck in a monotonous life. Leaders actively seek change, they embrace it. One of my biggest fears is getting stuck in the same job or same company. I encourage everyone I mentor or who works for me to always be learning, always be changing and always be seeking to better themselves. Life begins at the end of the comfort zone.
4. Waste Energy on Things They Can’t Control - The only thing you have control over is your response to uncontrollable situations. As a leader you have a risk-it-all attitude and you are bound to go through peaks of success, valleys of failure and everything in between. You will find people who will love you and people who will hate you. Strong leaders don’t waste energy worrying about things they can’t control.
5. Worry About Pleasing Others - One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my life, which was Dhivya’s (my mentor, friend, mentee, and a business partner) philosophy and was aptly worded by John Gardner is “You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.” I have an obsessive need to make sure everyone loves me and if someone does not, I end up spending a lot of time trying to please them. I have been working on this for quite sometime and am getting better at it (This is one reason why I never ventured into sales, because you have to take constant rejections)
6. Are not afraid to feel emotion - There can be no success without passion and there can be no passion without emotions. The ability to connect with fellow humans is one of the most important skills one needs to have to be a successful leader and lead a happy life. I will talk more in detail about this in the emotional intelligence blog I have been working on for 2 months. I will also cover in detail the learning of the course “Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence” by Richard Boyatzis. For those of you who are interested in learning more about emotional intelligence should read the book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” by Daniel Goleman and the book “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Travis Bradberry. These are two very popular books on the subject. Coaching someone on emotional intelligence can be very tricky and I general get about 70 – 80% success rate. I have been successful at mentoring people, almost a 100% on every subject except on emotional intelligence. It is sad how many current and future leaders today do not even have a basic understanding of emotional intelligence. Disclosure: I recently tried teaching the course “Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence” on a mentee and it didn’t work. I am yet to completely understand why, but I think teaching emotional intelligence is very tricky and it is best to tell the person what you are trying to do upfront and get a buy-in. In my case, I think it was a combination of not telling the person all the techniques of improving emotional intelligence but also I found the second reason in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman (Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences) According to the the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky’s work “will be remembered hundreds of years from now,” and that it is “a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.” They are, Brooks said, “like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.” Once I started reading this book to understand a few questions I had on emotional intelligence, I found this book providing deeper insights into human irrationality and intuition.
7. Fear of Taking Calculated Risks - Strong leaders have a high risk tolerance and tend to employ risk it all strategies. They analyze all the variables and take calculated risk as there can be no success without taking risks. They have the conceptual ability to see all the possible outcomes and control the execution in order to result in a favorable outcome. The planning fallacy is “only one of the manifestations of a pervasive optimistic bias,” Kahneman writes, which “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.” Now, in one sense, a bias toward optimism is obviously bad, since it generates false beliefs — like the belief that we are in control, and not the playthings of luck. But without this “illusion of control,” would we even be able to get out of bed in the morning? Optimists are more psychologically resilient, have stronger immune systems, and live longer on average than their more reality-based counterparts. Moreover, as Kahneman notes, exaggerated optimism serves to protect both individuals and organizations from the paralyzing effects of another bias, “loss aversion”: our tendency to fear losses more than we value gains. It was exaggerated optimism that John Maynard Keynes had in mind when he talked of the “animal spirits” that drive capitalism.
8. Giving Up After Failure - As long as every failure brings you closer to your ultimate goal, failing is not a bad thing. The important thing is to learn from it and get one step closer to your goals. Failure can teach you a lot more than success and as a leader you are going to fail many times. If you are not failing, then you are not taking enough risks, not pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone and obviously you will not fully realize your potential. I have mentored 28 people so far and currently mentoring 3 more. I failed mentoring one person in 2013 and I can honestly say that I learned more from that one failure then any successes I had mentoring in the past.
9. Fearing Alone Time - Strong leaders use alone time to plan, reflect, and reenergize for the next race. Whether they were victorious or defeated in the past competition, they know that every individual run is just a sprint and ultimately they need to remain strong for the marathon.
10. Expecting Immediate Results - Staying power is the most important trait for a strong leader. Good grades and fancy education is not going to guarantee you success. Strong leaders do not expect automatic success. They work hard. They compromise and make sacrifices. They make friends along the way and maybe even a few sharks (someone they have a lot to prove to so that they can say you were wrong about me) in their life. They take their school breaks as an opportunity to engage with the world at large, gathering all kinds of experiences and constantly bettering themselves.

Which of these traits do you need to improve on? It is important to critically evaluate yourself and work on these qualities to become a strong leader who your employees would love to be influenced by.