The 5 Characteristics of Highly Effective Leaders

The number of books on leadership could fill a small library. Books by academics, biographers,  motivational speakers, sports stars, military leaders, CEOs, ex-Presidents and the like, line the shelves of Dymocks, Angus & Roberston and Borders. There are enough leadership ‘experts’ and accompanying theories for a lifetime of reading.

The recent RCSA Owners and Managers Conference had leadership as its core theme. Many leaders shared their thoughts on what defined excellent leadership and why it is important. The common theme was clear – as an industry that is both high growth, and a large employer of Generation X and Generation Y, the impact and cost of poor leadership is enormous.

The template for a successful leader in the twentieth century was a decision maker and resource allocator who viewed employees as tools through which efficiency and productivity were extracted, like juice from a lemon. The leader for today’s world of work treats an employee as a responsible adult, consequently inspiring and fuelling the employee’s growth in self worth and self-expression. The impact of this approach is that the employee comes to work each day feeling that their ‘real self’ is both encouraged and values, rather than having to be checked at the door each morning when they arrive, and collected when they leave.

I have read many leadership books and one that stands out, and is the basis of this article, is Good Business (Leadership, flow and the making of meaning) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University in California. He wrote the book as a summary of his research into effective leadership in the business world. Csikszentmihalyi was interested in leaders who created a work environment for a meaningful life in which work and the pursuit of financial rewards have their proper places. In other words, a place where employees experience work as increasing their sense of well-being and happiness as distinct from work being a neutral or negative force in this regard (as is so often the case).

From his research Csikszentmihalyi identifies five ‘life attitudes’ of the business leaders who create these unique places to work. The direct applicability of these five ‘life attitudes’ to my experience of leadership in recruitment companies (the great, the good, the bad and the ugly) since 1989, is the reason why I have chosen to analyse leadership in the recruitment industry through these five attitudes. The five ‘life attitudes’ are:

1. Optimism & future-mindedness
The leader needs to be both creating and empowering vision for the future as well as seeing today’s problems as merely challenges, the when solved, open the way for a more exciting future with greater possibilities. I joined Recruitment Solutions in January 1991 for just this reason. I was interviewed by Greg Savage, who spoke in a captivating way about what was ahead for the fledgling company. After I joined, when I was really struggling to make an impact as a new recruit, Greg kept urging me on, convinced (where I was not), that not only would the market pick up but I would see enormous rewards for my hard work and persistence in a ‘recession-we-had-to-have’ recruitment market. The other critical aspect of optimism that makes it even more important in recruitment leadership is due to the very nature of a recruiter’s job – dealing with ‘no’ every day. Recruiters hear ‘no’ from clients, prospects, candidates and colleagues all day, every day! It gets exhausting and it’s dangerous to a recruiter’s energy and self esteem. A leader in recruitment has to be mindful of their role in balancing up all this negative energy with lots of positive reinforcement to their team. Effective leaders understand that they need to provide four pieces of positive feedback for every one piece of feedback for improvement.

2. Trust, honesty and authenticity
The leader is not expected to have all the answers. Business is not a predictable linear process; there are many variables that impact results. Recruitment is even more unpredictable, as people are both our customer and our product, and we don’t control either of them in the same way, for example, that BMW controls the design and production of their motor vehicles. As we can’t rely on the integrity of clients or candidates, the integrity of the recruitment leader is even more critical. And it’s the little things that count. For example the culture established by the leaders at Recruitment Solutions around the time was clear – an 8am meeting meant an *am meeting, not 8.05 or even 8.02, but 8am. I knew that my weekly meeting with Greg started at 11am on Tuesday and he was never late, and the only reason for it not occurring would be if he was inte4rstate; if he was in Sydney – the meeting occurred. Greg was always ready to start on time at 11am and he expected the same from you. The temptation in recruitment leadership is to put the client or candidate ahead of the consultant, or another internal employee, but that sends a clear (mostly unintended) message; the consultant ranks (at best) 3rd on that leader’s list of priorities. Why, then, would the consultant put the leader (and by association, the company) higher on their list of priorities than the leader places them?

3. Perseverance to achieve excellence
The leader focuses on producing the highest quality product and/or service and is relentless in their pursuit of excellent, not for financial gain, but because they gain huge personal satisfaction from doing something to the highest standard. They build teams and organisations that are similarly driven. It was no coincidence that Recruitment Solutions rarely lost consultants to competitors (although it certainly happened). The standards that we all set, and were committed to improving, were very high. It was clear that almost all competitors that pursued our consultants did not match our operating standards, so that when people left, they mostly set up their own recruitment company (8 different companies to date that I can think of off the top of my head). Perseverance generates its own momentum when the leader communicates a compelling, optimistic future, builds trust through integrity and sets high standards. Who wouldn’t want to stay back late for a candidate interview, make that extra phone call, or bounce back from a demoralizing credit or bomb out, when your leader consistently demonstrates these traits?

4. Curiosity, learning and wisdom
The leader’s job is not to be a subject specialist, but to be a high-level generalist. To do this effectively a leader must be open to, and actively seek out, new experiences, both of a work and non-work nature. I heard Geoff Morgan speak at an RCSA breakfast earlier this year and from my interpretation of that speech (and having read the excellent Morgan & Banks book Flourish & Prosper) it was clear how the two principals were so complementary as leaders. Andrew Bank’s background in acting and story telling made him the natural optimistic vision creator and communicator, whereas Geoff’s curiosity made him the one that was always looking at whatever was new or interesting and seeing how it might be useful in creating a more effective business. No surprise that Morgan & Banks (the business) was years ahead of its time, in Australia at least, in the way it embraced the internet, and technology generally, to build a huge competitive advantage in candidate attraction, data storage and accessibility. A couple of things that Geoff shared at that breakfast suggest that age has not wearied his curiosity one bit and he is again lifting up rocks, peering around corners and finding new galaxies while most of us are still battling to find more than one suitable candidate for our short lists!

5. Empathy or emotional/social intelligence
The leader needs to be able to ‘stand in the shoes of another’ to understand their thoughts, feelings and actions. This does not necessarily mean agreeing with those thoughts, feelings and actions, but instead accepting them as valid expressions of the other person’s individuality. Effective leaders know that when a person feels validated and understood they are much more open to the leader’s feedback and coaching and hence much more likely to achieve better results, faster. Recruitment is a tough job, not academically or technically, but emotionally. Recruiters are emotional creatures, that’s why we work in this industry and aren’t accountants, engineers or whatever Mum and Dad might have wished for us as careers. One of the key reasons for my own success, both as a leader of recruiters, and now as a Leadership coach of recruitment leaders (Owners, GMs and Team Leaders) is that I know exactly what it’s like to be in their shoes, and I have a way of effectively communicating this fact. I started off as a very ordinary recruiter, then a very ordinary leader of recruiters so I have plenty of stories to share about my failings and what I learnt from frequently falling on my face. Showing your humanity as a leader gives permission to your people to embrace their own humanity and be empathetic (not sympathetic) with their clients and candidates who may otherwise write off recruiters as unqualified, fast buck, body-shoppers.

The challenges for the recruitment industry in the next decade are many; skill shortages, increased regulation, higher client and candidate expectations, current generation job seeker sites (eg SEEK), next generation job seeker sites (eg Jobster), to name just a handful. These challenges require highly effective leadership to both recognise the specific nature of the challenges and, most critically, to inspire the consultants at the coalface who ultimately  influence the choices our current and future customers make about the relevance and value of our industry.