Winning at Leadership: How to Become an Effective Leader

By Sal Monastero

With heart, candor and wisdom, Sal Monastero here delivers invaluable guidance that parents, teachers, coaches, leaders, and managers at every level in all walks of life can apply to their own betterment and to the well-being and affirmation of their colleagues and teammates.

David M. Darst, CFA Managing Director and Chief Investment Strategist Morgan Stanley Smith Barney

Sal creates a compelling path to leadership excellence. His 37 years of field leadership experience provides readers with real-life stories of what to and what not to do as a leader. Sals personal experiences allow readers to significantly accelerate their own leadership journey.

Gerald Herbison, MSM, ChFC, CASL, CFP, CLF Director, CLF Program Assistant Professor, Management Studies The American College

Many of us are not born natural leaders but most of us can develop leadership traits that allow us to successfully handle complex issues on a daily basis. In Winning at Leadership, a former Wall Street executive teaches both experienced and novice managers the communications skills, personal values, and problem-solving abilities he learned and implemented during the nearly four decades he effectively led an organization in a competitive and challenging marketplace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450278362

Sal Monastero

Sal Monastero, a retired managing director of Morgan Stanley, guides managers on a step-by-step journey from method leadership to people leadership, where success comes from engaging with others. While sharing his own frustrating mistakes and personal stories, Monastero teaches leaders specifically how to: • Show respect to the people above and show heart to the people we lead • Learn that every experience has future value • Listen to employees’ concerns • Recognize that everything matters to someone • Determine a consistent philosophy and follow it

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Section 1: Learn to Be a Leader

Chapter 1: Learn to Be a Leader

Chapter 2: Leaders Must Possess the Right Motives to Earn Followers

Chapter 3: Successful Leaders are Good Listeners

Chapter 4: Successful Leaders Communicate Personally

Chapter 5: Successful Leaders Know the Needs of Their Team

Chapter 6: Successful Leaders Know Everyone on Their Team Is a Volunteer

Section 2: Leadership Values and Skills

Chapter 8: Successful Leaders Are Decisive

Chapter 9: Successful Leaders Are Positive Leaders

Chapter 10: Successful Leaders Are Inspiring

Chapter 11: Successful Leaders Are Honest

Chapter 12: Successful Leaders Are Confident

Section 3: Actions of Successful Leaders

Chapter 13: Successful Leaders Think Like Owners

Chapter 14: Successful Leaders Set and Monitor Priorities

Chapter 15: Successful Leaders Manage Conflicts

Chapter 16: Successful Leaders Never Stop Coaching

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my leadership team: Verene Torres, Dana Valius, and Jack Mitchell.

Preface

This book is written with the belief that most of us are not born natural leaders. My goal is to give you practical, realistic information on the winning leadership traits I learned over the thirty-seven years I was a leader. More importantly, I want to save you from making the frustrating mistakes that most new leaders make early in their careers. This book will give you the knowledge to make decisions like a veteran leader. If you are already a veteran leader, use this book as a refresher course in leadership. I know there were many times I needed refreshing and am thankful to those who provided it for me.

Introduction

Learning to become an effective leader begins with developing harmony between your head and your heart. My concentration is on the leadership traits that you must possess to successfully handle the issues all leaders are faced with day after day. You can approach the issues either with your intellect alone or with your heart and intellect working in unison. Most new leaders are very good at using their intellects to make decisions but learn only after many years to allow their hearts to show to those they lead.

I use the terms manager and leader interchangeably. Strictly speaking, the definitions of the words are not interchangeable. A leader is defined as someone who can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task.¹ A manager is defined as someone who can organize and coordinate the activities of an enterprise in accordance with certain policies in order to achieve clearly defined objectives.² Leaders influence and enlist the support of followers. Managers tend to act based on defined policies and objectives under the direction of a leader.

However, my belief is that managers who do not see themselves as leaders are only administrators. In the marketplace of business, education, sports, or even the military, a leader is worth more than an administrator, who fulfills only the technical aspects of a position. A leader-manager possesses the ability to inspire others to follow but also has the organizational skills needed to be successful in the chosen business. If you choose to be a leader-manager, you are guaranteed to be successful.

This book is divided into three sections. Section one, Learning to Be a Leader, covers some of the most important personal skills that effective leaders must possess. In this section, you will learn the importance of constantly being open to learning from any situation in which you find yourself. In addition, motives, listening, communication, and empathy skills are covered. Finally, I end section one with the secret key to success that all winning leaders eventually learn—everyone is a volunteer.

Section two, The Value Skills, addresses the need for leaders to be consistent, decisive, positive, inspiring, honest, and confident. These are the make-it-or-break-it personal values that will either assist you in earning volunteers or cause you be an ineffective leader. Each chapter will give you practical suggestions on how to be effective as a leader.

Section three, The Action Skills, will help you with the most frequent issues that you face as a leader. I start this section with learning to think like an owner. There is no lesson more important to leadership and no skill that helped me more over a thirty-seven-year career than this. In the following chapters, you will see the importance of setting and monitoring priorities, managing conflicts, and being a coach.

No book can cover every skill, value, and function of leadership. Every leadership book will address these and other aspects of leadership. My goal is to give you a practical book with ideas that can be put into action immediately.

Finally, I should address an obvious question that may be on your mind right now: What can I learn about leadership from someone who was not a famous CEO, politician, or sports figure? The simplest answer is that you can learn a lot. Day after day for thirty-seven years, I handled the same issues that you will handle. The leaders who are at the highest levels in an organization don’t deal with the same situations as us. Frankly, they have people just like you and me who handle the issues for them.

I hope you find this book helpful.

Section One

Learn to Be a Leader

Chapter One

Learning to Be a Leader

In his book Coaching,³ Ferdinand F. Fournies described what I was like when I was promoted into my first management position. I think he was describing almost everyone who receives a promotion into a first leadership position. He probably was describing you too. He said that when someone is promoted, the person who does the promoting thinks this: You are a manager because I just made you one; therefore, you must know how to do the job. In other words, the person making the promotion is thinking, I promoted him to his position; therefore, he must be qualified. If he wasn’t qualified, I wouldn’t have promoted him. Fournies goes on to say that when the new manager fails, the primary reason for failure is assumed to be unchangeable, inherent limitation in the individual, rather than an inability to do something because he or she does not know how to do it.

Most superiors in an organization will not admit that they picked the right person but just did not put enough time into coaching the new leader properly. So when the newly promoted person fails, they think it has to be because he or she failed to do something. In truth, the superior made a mistake by not realizing that technical qualifications are not the same as leadership qualifications. Technical qualifications involve proficiency in a particular function of the business, such as sales ability or accounting or financial skill. A person who is technically proficient is not necessarily ready for leadership.

The second mistake is more unfortunate, because the newly promoted people think that because their superiors promoted them, they must be qualified. In reality, the only people who know that the newly promoted leader lacks leadership training are the ones who work with and for that leader. They not only see it but often are called upon to become the coaches and trainers of their new leader. This kind of coaching can sometimes be harsh, particularly when the new leader is not prepared. In these situations, the employees often will provide negative coaching and either be critical or show their frustration in other ways.

Employees may ask for transfers. They may complain to coworkers. They may leave the company. My goal is to give you the tools to be a successful leader so that you avoid some of the mistakes many of us made and still make. The solution is to learn to be a leader.

Leadership Can Be Learned

Learning to be a leader does not have to be difficult, but it does require learning. The reason is that people follow a person, not methods, and most new leaders start out with methods. They emphasize job-specific methods or rules rather than seeing that the leadership function is people oriented.

It was perhaps a little easier for me because I was a leader in a sales organization. When you lead a sales organization, it quickly becomes obvious that there is no way you can be successful unless your salespeople and their support staff are both personally successful and supportive of your leadership. If you don’t figure that out on your own, they will be sure to tell you. Every dime of my revenues came from the people I managed. I did not personally produce anything of value. They did! More importantly, I learned that my success or failure was not going to be dictated by the corporate leaders in New York. It depended on my success or failure in gaining the support of the people who worked with me locally. I needed them!

It is possible that it is more difficult to understand how important your employees are in a non-sales leadership management position, because the fruits of their efforts are not as immediately measured as in a sales management position. However, it is important to remember that whether you are in a sales organization or perform an administrative function—in any leadership position—you will fail if those you lead are failing. It is interesting to me that there are so many leaders who have the ability to divorce themselves from the failures of their employees yet are willing to own the successes they achieve. I have known people who believed they were good leaders even though their business units were failing. For example, one of my former employees was responsible for the development of new salespeople. He was not good at it and had a dismal track record. When I would press him on the trainees’ poor performances, he would terminate them rather than improve them and then come back and say, I showed them the door. I would then press him on the poor performance and his response was never to take any personal responsibility. It was always the trainee’s fault, not his.

These leaders believe that circumstances cause their lack of performance and that they earned a promotion based on effort not results. It’s similar to playing a sporting event where the score doesn’t matter.

We Start Leading in Middle Management

For most of us, our first meaningful leadership position will be in what is often described as middle management. Middle management, though, can mean a lot of things. For our purpose, I will use middle management to mean any position, in any endeavor, where you lead people directly and not through intermediaries. You could be leading a platoon, a basketball team, a department, a school, or a charity, and by my definition, you would be in middle management. I think the textbook definitions of middle management miss the point of leadership and management in real life. Most definitions describe a middle manager as someone who heads a specific department or business unit. One definition states that a middle manager is responsible for implementing the top management’s policies and plans.⁴ I believe that in real life, in real businesses, most of us are in middle management according to my working definition. All of us—even the CEO of a corporation or the coach of the finest team in sports history—have people to whom we report and people we lead. The CEO reports to the board of directors who report to the shareholders. Everyone reports to someone. We are all in the middle. We all receive leadership and policy from those above us in the organization, and we all take what we receive and provide leadership and policy for those we lead.

In the book Competitive Strategy, authors Pearce and Robinson talk about stakeholders. Every one of us in business has stakeholders. The board has shareholders. The CEO has the board. We also have stakeholders below us, for want of a better term. The CEO is also responsible for the employees, who are stakeholders as well. There are stakeholders above and below us on the organizational chart. We are all in middle management in some way.

The decisions made by the CEO of a corporation or the owner of a team may be critically important to their organizations and affect many people. But the decisions made locally to bring about the CEO’s decisions are of greater importance to local people, because their careers are more affected by the local leader than by the CEO. If the local leader is ineffective, it doesn’t matter how dynamic the CEO is—you will have an unrewarding career in the environment he creates. On the other hand, a gifted local leader can create an environment that provides a career experience that is truly rewarding even if the CEO is ineffective.

Corporations are often global, but corporate success is achieved locally in remote locations or in small departments. Local leaders, unknown to shareholders or owners or CEOs, are called upon to implement the corporate strategy. They are the ones who either make or break the organization. Local leaders generally manage a small, local part of the business and are therefore commonly in middle management. Many times they are new to their leadership positions, because they are managing a smaller type of endeavor than the corporation itself. Middle-management leadership is the area, however, where we find the new leaders who have not been trained properly for their roles. They typically have recently been promoted because they possessed the technical knowledge or sales ability to do the jobs of the people they are leading, but they have not received training on how to lead others. For example, take a person who is a successful accountant and is promoted to run the finance department but may not be prepared to organize, motivate, and inspire others. Middle management is also the place where we find veteran leaders who have not progressed to more senior positions. For them, keeping vital and personally motivated is as important a leadership task as motivating the people they lead.

Leadership Takes Heart, Not Methods

I was a local leader in a major corporation. I was a middle leader-manager by my definition. I reported to a regional director and had salespeople who reported to me. I had to grow a business, lead others to do business and grow, and manage the profit and loss of the business as well as performing all the administrative functions that go along with those responsibilities.

When I started in management, I made the most common rookie mistake of a new leader—I was too dogmatic. I knew all the policies and procedures and expected that everyone else knew them too. Because I had been successful as a salesman, I knew what it took to build a successful client base. I knew how hard someone had to work to be successful. My problem was that I expected everyone else to do it just like me, and it turned out that everyone was different. They weren’t bad different—just different. Some, in fact, were differently better, but all I saw was the different.

I relied too much on the methods and not enough on the passion.

I relied too much on the procedures and methods of management and not enough on putting heart into management. I knew what those above me wanted, and I knew that my career depended on their approval. I didn’t know yet that it was the approval of those on my local team that mattered more. I didn’t know yet that the secret to success for all of us in middle management is to show respect to the people above us but show heart to the people we lead. I had to learn that there was no such thing in management as being the boss. In fact, leaders quickly learn that as soon as we think we are the bosses, we’re on our way to failure. It is very difficult for a boss-type person to be a leader, because the boss person thinks people must follow, and the truth is that people have to want to follow.

The secret to success is to show respect to the people above us and show heart to the people we lead.

You can’t be a leader without followers!

All of us in leadership roles need people to lead, and we have to earn each person we want to lead one by one. We can’t tell them to follow us because we are appointed—we have to earn them. Leaders need consenting followers. Surprisingly, this is one of the least-discussed concepts in leadership training. Most leadership training programs focus on the methods of leadership. They focus on the technical aspects of leadership, not the winning over of followers. All successful leaders eventually understand that their success is the result of earning followers who consent to their leadership.

One of my first leaders did this very service for me.

After a number of people resigned from my sales office, my regional director asked me to join him for lunch. He told me that I was all about the methods and was not getting to know my people; I was not showing that I cared about them as individuals. All I cared about was the business as a whole, and I had not recognized yet that the business was nothing more than the sum of the people. I was about efficiency, not people. He told me that leadership required a heart. He was saying nicely that it was obvious that I did not care enough about the people on my team. I was cold and distant, and I was on my way to failing. People were not consenting to follow me. I was the appointed leader but not the accepted leader. He was right, and I worked at changing. The fact that I survived thirty-seven years in management hopefully shows that I changed for the better. You can too.

The job of being a middle manager—or really a leader in the middle—is the most difficult one in a company, because the middle managers are the ones called upon to be the implementers of policy. On the other hand, the job of being a local