How to be a leader people want to follow

One of the more meaningful compliments I’ve received in my career came from my boss and CEO late in 2017 when he told me, "You have a knack for being the kind of leader who people really want to follow."

It was high praise from an extremely popular, decent guy with a legion of loyal followers. Yet it wasn’t until my transition into executive coaching in 2020 that I fully appreciated what the boss was conveying to me that crisp fall day.

I am fortunate to have a dose of natural talent in an area that the world’s most renowned leadership thinkers have devoted stacks of books to for the past couple of decades.

That is to think of any leadership role as an opportunity, maybe even an obligation, to inspire and motivate as opposed to wield power. As Jack Welch wrote bluntly in Straight from the Gut, "When you were made a leader you weren’t given a crown, you were given the responsibility to bring out the best in others."

That means completely letting go of the idea that our position gives us the right to demand, dictate or direct. Now, in 2024, demanding, dictating and directing, certainly on any sort of sustained basis, engenders little more than sustained mediocrity. We simply can’t force things out of other adults, even those that we compensate well.

So how does a senior executive become a leader who only inspires and motivates? How do we set direction, allocate resources, make plans, oversee execution and drive results with only a carrot and without a stick?

Here are the three keys based on what I’ve learned through my studies and what I see in action with my C-suite clients every day.

1. Fine-tune our mindset

We must believe every day that the leaders around us, and the people they lead, are immensely capable, resourceful people. That they are just as full of useful ideas as we are and just as capable of implementing them with conscientiousness and excellence.

As Michael Mantell entitled his book, The Link is What You Think, the biggest influence over how the people around us perform is our own attitude. If we allow ourselves to indulge in negative thinking about the commitment of our people, it becomes much harder to do anything else on this list.

2. Cultivate the only authority that matters

Despite perhaps the most common myth of what it’s like to be a manager or senior leader in business, we can’t simply rely on the authority our position grants us. Nor can we rely on the authority that is derived from our experience, skills or accomplishments.

We must cultivate our moral authority, which has nothing to do with our rank or role. Moral authority is the degree to which our words and actions, our beliefs and behaviors, align. It’s the volume of integrity that our daily choices and actions, both small and large, reveal and the degree to which we’re in it for the good of all.

In the book Visioneering, Andy Stanley writes, "It is the alignment between a person’s convictions and behavior that makes his life persuasive. Herein is the key to sustained influence."

In his terrific book LeaderShift, John C Maxwell argues that to achieve moral authority, we must dial in four Cs:

• Competence: We have to deliver the goods. We need not know everything, but it must be clear to others that we can encounter a leader’s challenges skillfully.

• Courage: We have to be brave enough to make tough decisions and take bold action when warranted.

• Consistency: We must show up in a similar way, behave in a similar manner and produce similar outcomes every day.

• Character: We must be bigger on the inside than outside. Maxwell says it beautifully: "The motives of your heart must be good."

3. Connect and cultivate

We must go all-in to show our people we care in ways far beyond providing them a fair wage, solid benefits and pleasant working conditions. If we want to unlock their intrinsic motivation, which is absolutely the only way to see them go on to move mountains on our business’ behalf, then we must become genuinely curious about what’s in it for them.

Prove it to them by asking again and again about their aspirations, their ambitions and their dreams.

Ask them exactly how they might go about achieving greatness on your company’s behalf, and then create the conditions for them to do so. It’s a way of leading that’s less about us, our ideas, our accomplishments and our inner celebrity, and more about setting the stage for our followers to thrive so that our business is positioned to succeed.

As world-renowned adventure racer Robin Benincasa put it, "You don’t inspire your teammates by showing them how amazing you are. You inspire them by showing them how amazing they are."

Connect with your people in a one-on-one, very real way. Coach them through how the work of your business helps them get where they’re going. Help them see how going all-in for your business will reveal to them how amazing they are. As Jim Goodnight, Founder and CEO of SAS, said: "Treat employees like they make a difference and they will."

If we want to be leaders who people would follow even if we didn’t have them on a payroll, then in everything we do, we must treat our followers’ employment as a temporary gift to us, not a favor we extended to them.

We must view their employment as a stopover on their professional journey, not a guaranteed obligation to us. But it’s a journey from which they bear extraordinary gifts.

If we treat them like people who fascinate us and strike us as infinitely worthy, capable and of value, then they’ll bring their gifts out for us in extraordinary ways. It’s how competitive advantage is achieved.