The Lens of Leadership™: Being the Leader Others Want to Follow

By Cory Bouck

The leadership exodus of the Baby Boomers is creating dramatically-accelerated promotions in organizations and leaving behind a significant leadership skills gap.
• Do you aspire to build a truly high performance team?
• Is your career not moving forward quickly enough?
• Are you in a little over your head as a leader?
If so, this book can help!
All intentions, actions, and results should be viewed through what Cory Bouck calls “The Lens of Leadership” to bring focus to the leader’s ultimate accountability for results. Doing so will magnify your personal performance, improve your organization’s results, and accelerate your career progression. Failing to accept total responsibility sets low performance expectations, perpetuates a culture of mediocrity, and cripples the career opportunities of those you lead.
Whether you are an experienced leader with broad responsibilities, an early leader who wants to get ahead faster, or an aspiring future leader who wants to expand your influence, viewing your role through The Lens of Leadership will ensure that you deliver better results, get promoted faster, and inspire those around you.
In The Lens of Leadership, you will learn:
• How to set yourself apart from your peers by developing an accountability mindset that consistently examines results through The Lens of Leadership.
• How to earn a reputation for strong leadership at every level through your "followership."
• How to act, paradoxically, as both a leader and follower at the same time throughout your career.
• How to develop all of the must-have tools for your leadership toolbox.
• How to increase your impact, develop more bench strength, and build a high performance team by learning to serve, build, and inspire others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626756540

Cory Bouck

Cory Bouck is the Director of Organizational Development & Learning (OD&L) at Johnsonville Sausage and is the author of The Lens of Leadership: Being the Leader Others WANT to Follow. He is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, and also served there as a leadership instructor. Cory graduated in the top 1 percent of student leadership ranks as a Midshipman. As an instructor, he led a team of civilian PhDs and military instructors in managing the content and delivery of the advanced core leadership course. He is a former Naval Flight Officer. Cory led a P-3 Orion combat aircrew around the world, including missions over Bosnia-Herzegovina. His crew was twice named #1 of 48 crews in the Atlantic Fleet. He led brand and event marketing teams at General Mills, Newell-Rubbermaid, and Johnsonville Sausage. Cory led the team that developed a NASCAR strategy for the Chex cereal portfolio with Richard Petty Enterprises. At Newell-Rubbermaid’s Little Tikes toy division, the product development team he led earned a Parent’s Magazine “Best Toys of the Year” award. The Johnsonville brand team he led more than doubled net-margin dollar growth in two years and grew household penetration by 10%. That team also earned an “EFFIE” from the North American Marketing Association for effective advertising. He joined Johnsonville's OD&L team to create a leader-development system. In three years, the internal promotion rate for leadership positions increased from 40% to 70%. He now leads the OD&L function and is responsible for employee development, technical training, and executive coaching. He is active in leadership outside of work. He served two terms as an elected city councilman, chairing several committees while working with state and federal legislators. Cory is a pilot and youth mentor in the Civil Air Patrol. His personal purpose is, “To help coach the people whose lives I connect with to high achievement in whatever drives their purpose.”

Book preview

Investments.

SERVE

Part One

FOLLOWING

I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

— Thomas Paine, The Crisis, No. 1, 1776

Chapter One

FOLLOWING IS THE FIRST FORM OF LEADING

Give me a stock clerk with a goal, and I will give you someone who will make history. Give me someone without a goal, and I will give you a stock clerk.

— J.C. Penney

If you believe lack of authority prevents you from leading effectively, it is time to rethink your understanding of leadership.

— Mike Bonem and Roger Patterson, Leading

From the Second Chair

Just about everybody has a boss. You do. Your boss does. If you work for a company or even a not-for-profit, your most senior leader probably reports to a Board of Directors. Each director is elected or appointed by a collection of shareholders or other stakeholders. If you work in an obvious hierarchy like a factory, the government, or a multinational corporation, then you can see the stack of bosses in the organizational chart. If you are a small business owner competing in a Darwinian market, the customer is your boss. Even the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, has a boss: the American people. He gets daily informal feedback through polls, and he endures what is probably the world’s toughest performance review after four years.

Unless you are one of the very rare exceptions (a self-employed visionary inventor, Employee #1 in your own company, or a senior family member in a privately-held business), the journey to great leadership begins—and continues throughout your career—by demonstrating great followership. Great leadership is mastery of the paradoxical dual roles of both leader and follower. The first among these is the follower.

BECOMING A FOLLOWER

The skills of great followership are so important because they teach us a vital first principle of leadership: service. Many great, global organizations as diverse as General Electric, the Peace Corps, Procter & Gamble, and the Walt Disney Company have leadership development programs that start with some sort of early process for revealing, then reducing, the natural tendency of people to act in their self-interest first, which teaches the cornerstone of camaraderie and sacrifice: that you are part of something larger and more important than yourself.

The most obvious example of this is the military services, where upon your joining, your commanding officer will order your hair cut short, issue you standard uniforms for all occasions, restrict you to various standard behaviors, and work hard to break you down physically, mentally, and emotionally as an individual before building you back up. Military recruits lose their sense of individuality and establish their primary self-identification as being part of their unit through this process. They earn tangible artifacts—like T-shirts, patches, awards, qualifications, and ribbons—through shared trial and experience. They learn self-mastery through service to the greater team. During this time, they learn that individual accomplishment is not what is rewarded. They learn that accountability is bigger than just responsibility for self: it is accountability for the success of the whole.

It’s not just the military that has this sort of intentional, directed acculturation. In Built to Last, Collins and Porras coined the phrase Cult-like Cultures to describe one of the indicators that distinguishes a currently-successful firm from a truly visionary company that is likely to deliver long-term, self-sustaining success. Many of these high-performing, long-successful companies have culture-perpetuating tools:

An ideology with an inspiring affirmation or pledge

A tendency to hire new people through a tight candidate screening process

Early employee indoctrination

Internal universities

On- and off-the-job socialization

A stated promote-from-within policy

A unique language and terminology

Internal mythology and folk tales that reinforce what great looks like

A comprehensive reward system that is designed to create full financial and psychological buy-in to the company.

Many hiring, recruiting, and interviewing processes are designed to accomplish this before you even join the company. Instead of shaving your head and teaching you to march, they make sure that the ones coming through the door will be a fit using tools like academic tests (e.g., Procter & Gamble’s P&G-MAT), personality profiling, behavioral interviews, and pre-offer socialization. And great companies work hard to acculturate new employees as they walk in the door for day one: New cast members (employees) at Walt Disney, for example, go through a week-long program called Traditions.

Team members and employees who learn to follow first, learn to serve the needs of their leaders. Again, this doesn’t mean that they are joining a caste system or perpetuating some outdated industrialage construct. I’m not encouraging followers to act subservient or to treat leaders deferentially. Great followership demonstrates your recognition that leaders need teammates who are aligned with the leader’s goals, are ready to go the extra mile to accomplish those goals, and possess enough learning agility to anticipate their leader’s needs and fill those gaps without needing to be told to do so. Followership means learning to write with your leader’s style, to speak his (or her) mind and represent his interests at meetings he is unable to attend, and to take on thankless tasks if that is what is necessary for the team to accomplish its goals. It requires you to develop the ability to conduct a comprehensive situational assessment from the leader’s perspective. It may even require you to assume roles and thinking styles that complement the leader’s gaps that he or she may not even acknowledge having.

Followership is a constant part of leadership because everyone has a boss. The earlier and more consistently you demonstrate great followership, the faster your reputation will develop as a go to member of your team, and the faster you will earn promotion to the level and the type of work you are passionate about. Before most leaders will promote you or recommend you to join another team within a company, they want to observe you to perform at that level in your current role. They want to see your daily professionalism and consistent willingness to go the extra mile to deliver reliably great results. This mindset is not outdated. It is a timeless reality of professional development. This process is earn your chops, not wait your turn. It is a willingness to be measured by your performance and results, no matter how early you are in your career. It screams, I can hunt with the big dogs, and I’m willing to prove it! in what Dan Pink calls the Conceptual Age, our current time when innovative ideas that contribute to solving big problems are the coin of the realm.

Great followership begins with fully investing yourself in the ideology of the company or team you have joined. Take the acculturation seriously. Study the behaviors that earn rewards. Listen to the internal mythologies and tease out what behaviors lead to success and which ones lead to failure. What actions are rewarded or punished?

Ask many different leaders what it takes to succeed and compare their answers. There are many different paths to success in any organization. Look at the behavior of all employees—up and down—through The Lens of Leadership: Do they talk about success and failure in terms of leadership of the project or team? How are people held accountable for results? Do leaders talk about what it takes to win, and how winning will specifically be defined? Do they talk about failure with words and tones that convey contempt for losing? Can they explain why they expect to win?

Take note of your leaders and others as they communicate and coach. Collect techniques that are consistent with your style, and adapt others that seem to work so they are right for you to use. You are always building your leadership toolbox because everyone has a boss. And no matter where you are in an organization, you can learn as much from bad leaders as you can from great ones.

GREAT FOLLOWERSHIP ROLES

Great followers see themselves as one of many facilitators for the team, and a great facilitator serves many roles. In their book Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work, Chris Peterson and Gayle Pergamit explain that great facilitators wear many hats. One of them is the valet hat: learn your leader’s presentation style, the voice she writes with, how she builds her stories and designs her PowerPoint slides, and then design the content you create for her with that in mind.

Another is the Socrates-like mentor hat: Know your leader’s job well enough to stimulate challenging, counterintuitive thinking. Know when to provoke, and when to let it go. Whatever your leader’s weaknesses (the methodology of the research, the financials of the project, the people aspects of dealing with change, dealing with marketing, etc.), shore them up by becoming great at those things. Amplify your leader’s strengths, supplement her gaps, and train yourself to think like she thinks.

The chameleon hat demonstrates that you know when to be visible, and when to be subtle or even invisible. Remember, great followership is about making your boss look good, not immediately standing out yourself. A follower who earns a reputation for seeing around corners and putting the answer to that unanticipated question in the backup slides for the boss will always be a standout, even while blending in. This may feel like a big risk. Many early-career followers fear having to share credit—or worse, not getting credit—for every little thing they do. By focusing on making your boss look good, you certainly risk being taken advantage of. But a leader who repeatedly exploits your facilitation and gives you inadequate public credit is telling you loudly and clearly that he or she is unworthy of your followership.

…

Like The Force in Star Wars, the Pastor/Parent role has a darksided temptation. You must recognize that an enormous trust has been vested in you. Never borrow the rank of your boss, and never leverage the trust, the power, the access, or the voice you have earned to serve yourself or manipulate others. Your abuse will be discovered because once you use it successfully, you will continue to use it, but more sloppily, until you destroy the trust. Once your over-step as a consigliore is discovered, it will end your influence, and probably your career in that organization.

…

Earning what Jack Welch calls the Pastor/Parent hat gives followers the opportunity to demonstrate their professional maturity. Welch writes, Pastors hear the ‘sins’ and complaints without recrimination. Parents love and nurture, but give coaching fast and straight when you’re off-track. Once you have earned the Pastor/Parent trust, you will become a go-to influencer with your boss.

I observed one of the best examples of followership I have ever seen when I was shadowing a very young director I was hoping to work for at Newell-Rubbermaid in the early 2000s. I was in a divisional marketing role, and he was the leader of the company’s corporate NASCAR program. We were at a dinner hosted by the CEO and his staff for all twenty-five of his division presidents, who were there to network and lobby for resources. At that time, Newell-Rubbermaid was a very political organization, and the CEO, who was a fierce and hot-tempered competitor as far back as his college wrestling days, encouraged that kind of competition between his presidents. It was a business mixer, and each of the division leaders jockeyed for time alone with the CEO to kiss the ring.

Early in the evening something big came undone, and before we knew it, the CEO and his COO left the gathering angry and in a hurry. We were in a city the whole group was used to gathering in, and the young director I was shadowing knew where the CEO and COO were likely to go to eat their dinner and sort out the problem unobserved by the twenty-five presidents. He confirmed this with a president who was closely connected to the CEO, and over the next few minutes, I heard him demonstrate a deft and exemplary act of followership.

He called the exclusive restaurant and asked for the maître d’. He said, Two very important, powerful men are on their way to your restaurant, and they are having a very, very bad day. I would like to help you ensure that they have a great experience at your restaurant. I want to make sure they come away having solved their very big problems and enjoyed themselves over a fantastic meal. He told the maître d’ insights about the pair’s culinary knowledge and preferences, gave him his name and cell phone number, and encouraged him to call if there were any questions or subtleties about the service that the maître d’ wanted to know. Then he gave the maître d’ his corporate credit card number in order to guarantee the servers a particularly high gratuity if the CEO and COO did not leave enough. Finally, he asked to speak to the restaurant’s sommelier, to whom he gave important insights about the CEO’s wine knowledge and preferences.

…

What if I have a lousy boss? All the more reason to support him or her! You WILL be noticed—and viewed very positively—if you can fill in your leader’s gaps. Think of it as serving the role, not the person. You are helping to make the team successful, and that is your obligation, whether you like and respect your leader, or not. You can motivate yourself by thinking about the informal leadership skills you are