Learn how to become a more authentic leader by using maxims to define your natural leadership style.

Authenticity is about being who you are. As you begin leading your people, you need to first understand and articulate a natural style that is most comfortable for you. If you’re showing up, putting on the mask every day, and acting in a manner that’s inconsistent with what you believe or what’s most comfortable for you, you’re actually going to set off alarms for the members of your team. They’ll see that inconsistency. They may not be sure about what’s not consistent, but it will make them uncomfortable. The better you can articulate your own natural style of leadership, the better off you’re going to be.

For me, one of my maxims around my natural leadership style is, “Kick up, kiss down.” Kicking up is about telling the higher-ups, “Hey, you guys made a mistake and I need to protect my team.” Kissing down is about praising the team when they deserve it. I learned this maxim from a great leader that I worked for at one point. Ryan was a really wonderful guy, and he was also a very calm kind of guy. You’d go in and he was very soothing. Well, one day I went to his office for a meeting. Ryan was on the phone and he was yelling. He was raging mad. I had never seen him like this. He was yelling somebody’s name and I only knew one person with this name. Ryan got so red, saying, “Oh, this is a dumb decision. I can’t believe you did this. You know what, my meeting’s here. I need to go and you need to fix this.” And he hung up. I asked him, “Who were you talking to?” He said the individual’s name, and this individual was a very senior executive at the company. He saw that I was a little bit confused that he was talking to this executive this way. Ryan said, “You know what? Kick up, kiss down. That’s my job.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “My responsibility is to kick up. When they make a mistake upstairs that negatively affects the team, as your leader, I have a responsibility to protect you and your team. And kiss down. That’s about praising people when they deserve it.” I said, “You know what? That’s really cool. I wanna be a leader just like Ryan. I wanna kick up and kiss down.”

Fast-forward a few months and Ryan made a dumb decision one day. I stormed in his office and I kinda went off a little bit on him. At the end of the conversation, he said, “You know what, you’re right. I made a bad decision. I’m gonna change it.” On my way out of his office, I looked at him and I said, “Kick up, right?” He said, “I can’t believe I taught you that.” This maxim that I’ve put into practice reminds me that my responsibility to take care of my team. It’s a style that works for me and it’s very comfortable. The members of my team now understand that’s Mike’s style. If he’s my leader, that’s what I can expect from him. It goes on to build that bond of trust between me and the members of my team.

As you think about your natural leadership style, think about how you prefer to behave. How are you most comfortable? Imagine if someone new joined your team and asked, “What can I expect of you?” How would you explain your leadership style to them? Imagine they say, “I don’t understand. Can you give me an example?” What would that example be? What’s that story that really crystallizes, “This is how I operate as a leader?” Within that story is where your maxim resides. Your maxim should be a trigger that reminds you of a story that exemplifies the leadership style that is most comfortable for you and sets the expectation with the members of your team for how you’re going to behave.

Again, as you define a leadership style that works, find something that’s emotionally resonant for you. Find something you’re really proud of or something you believe in very fiercely. This articulation needs to show up in the maxim and drive you to the type of behavior that will be consistent with the leadership style you like to live.

Want to learn more about developing your leadership philosophy? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to develop your leadership philosophy. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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The way you react to failure has a big impact on your team’s future performance and culture. Make sure you handle failures constructively.

As much as we like to celebrate success, there are going to be failures. They’re not fun and they can derail a team if you don’t handle the failure well. When there is failure, the first thing to remember is to avoid blame. Turn it into a learning opportunity. This is not about the individual. This is not personal. This is about behaviors and about choices we made that didn’t work out well. Find the opportunity to turn those into lessons learned. Think through how future actions can be taken that will help you avoid these failures the next time around.

Here are some principles for dealing with failure:

Fail as a team

First, fail as a team. Deconstruct the failure and understand what the root causes were. Identify all the places where the team could’ve improved. Maybe it was a process failure or a failure to provide information from one team member to another. Try to never make it about the individual. Instead, look at the processes that the team is following and where those broke down.

Praise risk-takers

Next, even when there’s failure, praise people for taking a risk. We’re always making risk/reward trade-offs and if you’re not encouraging people to take risks, you’re going to get a risk-averse culture where people are paralyzed and won’t make decisions. If they’re not making decisions, you’re not going to get that upside. So when you talk about failure, help people appreciate the risks the team took. Discuss what the team thought the odds of the risk were and what the final result was. If the risk didn’t work out, review what the actual odds were. Ask, “Next time around, how do we do this better?”

Your job as a leader, in terms of success and failure, is making sure that you celebrate successes and all forms of success every opportunity you get. Do so in a way that’s going to be targeted to the individual you’re trying to reward. When there’s failure, avoid making it about the individual. Instead, focus on, “What are the things that we, as a team, did wrong and what can we do differently the next time?” Taking this healthy approach and balance between success and failure will continue to build momentum for your team and keep team members engaged and excited.

Want to learn more about building high performing teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to build high performing teams. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Improve your team’s culture by celebrating your team members’ successes. Be careful, though…one person’s reward is another person’s punishment.

Success and failure are part of running a team day to day. You need to recognize and promote wins because it’s going to build momentum for the team and make them feel like they’re accomplishing great things.

There are a lot of great ways to acknowledge success. You can give people bonuses, provide them visibility opportunities, do some public recognition, give people increased responsibilities, and even promotions. All of these are very effective ways to celebrate the success of your team members. But remember…just because you think something is valuable doesn’t mean the team member will. You need to understand what personally motivates them and then reward them accordingly. If you’re not thoughtful about it, something you think of as a reward is going to be horrible from that person’s perspective.

For example, if you have somebody on your team who is very introverted and you decide that you’re going to take their success and celebrate it by putting that person on stage in front of a large audience, that introvert might really hate that situation and they’ll feel very uncomfortable. Even though you thought you were rewarding them and celebrating their success, you’ve turned it into a bad experience. 

Or, for example, you have somebody who’s very happy in their current role. They like their level of responsibilities because it allows them to have a proper work-life balance. Let’s say you decide they’re doing a great job and you want to celebrate that success by giving them a promotion with more responsibilities. Now they’re pulling their hair out and they’re very stressed out and unhappy because they really enjoyed their old role. This promotion isn’t a good way to celebrate their success. It’s actually a punishment.

So as you’re thinking about celebrating success for your people, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What would this individual really value?” Be sure that you communicate that success to the rest of the team. It helps build momentum and creates a culture of winning among those team members. People will feel proud to be associated with their teammates who are doing such great things.

Want to learn more about building high performing teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to build high performing teams. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Some leaders are uncomfortable providing feedback to their team members. Follow this feedback model to make giving feedback easier.

If we want people to improve, we have to give them feedback. Giving feedback can be really difficult because we feel like we might hurt someone’s feelings. We tend to shy away from uncomfortable conversations. We don’t want to tell somebody who we really like and respect that they’re falling short in some regard. So we avoid feedback, but that’s a huge mistake—especially as the leader of a high performing team. I’d like to offer an example of a feedback model that can remove the emotion from these conversations and help people focus on improving performance versus getting defensive. The model goes like this: Read more