What are the 4 Cs of leadership success?
All great leaders rely on four qualities that I call the four Cs of leadership.
Character
Let’s start with character. I don’t mean a character in a book or movie. Nor do I mean what people are thinking when they say, “my goodness, she certainly is a real character, bless her heart!” Character here means a combination of integrity, human decency, and values. Our behavior should reflect our character.
Here’s a sad tale on the subject.
I have been a boss, and I have had to fire people. The last time I did so, I suffered a failure of character. To be clear, this person had to go. She was toxic like Chernobyl. I gave her a year to get it together and, between the vocal hostility, the insubordination, and the near willful incompetence, I found there was no redeeming her. Need an example? After she left, we found voodoo dolls corresponding to her co-workers tucked all over her office. Each was impaled with strategically placed pins.
I could have handled the whole episode better, but my worst failure of character came on the day she was fired. I was only one year into my position, so I capitulated and used the procedure preferred by my mean-spirited boss. Her technique was to have the person called into the head of HR, who would hand the employee a one-sentence dismissal notice while refusing to answer questions. Then security would escort the now ex-employee to clean out their office. Have a nice weekend! The supervisor was not to be present so as to reduce complications and confrontations. It was a cowardly and cruel way to dismiss someone, anyone, even someone as dreadful as this particular employee.
On this occasion I insisted at least on being in HR when she came in, but I obediently stood outside the closed door as the deed was done. To this day, I think about how she must have felt being treated like a failed piece of equipment. If I had tapped into my integrity, if I had acted the leader, I would have defied my boss and could have given this woman the small satisfaction of a modicum of human decency in that moment.
I say all this knowing how truly appalling this employee was, too.
Communication
I have written about communication a good deal. It is the lifeblood of leadership. Leaders nourish relationships through communication, and relationships are the pumping heart of leadership.
As I always point out, communication is two-way, and great leaders listen first.
Years ago as a boss, I inherited some challenging employees. One in particular was extremely confrontational and unreasonable. Early on in my time as his boss, I had to tell him that a committee had denied a request he was looking forward to. Frankly, I just wanted to be done with it and with him, so I did not consider how the bad news would affect him. My communication to him was curt, unempathetic, all one-sided, and dismissive of his feelings. It further damaged my poor relationship with him, and we never really were able to reconcile despite my efforts over the years.
This guy was, like the employee in my first example, incorrigible, but I can’t help but wonder if we could have been just a smidgen more collegial had I taken the time to be a leader and communicate with him properly all those years before.
Compromise
Despite occasional bad press, compromise is a linchpin to getting anything done as a leader. Still, people resist altering their expectations even a little in part because we think of compromise as a failure. Consider these examples of how we use the word:
“The head gasket was compromised, so the valve blew.”
“He compromised his reputation by promoting his unqualified girlfriend.”
“As she walked into the meeting, she was suddenly debilitated by a stabbing pain in a compromising part of her anatomy as though someone had stuck her with a large pin.”
In practice, though, compromise is key to the politics of possibility (as opposed to the politics of personal destruction). It’s how we move things forward when working with others.
Strangely we often think that not compromising even a little shows integrity, but that is rarely the case.
When I was a university dean, I had a boss who would take bizarre and unconscionable stances. One time he vehemently and publicly rejected a course proposal by one of the departments I oversaw. His reasoning was not only flawed, but it led him to accuse the department of highly unethical intent. It was pretty wacky behavior even for him.
The truth was that the course proposal simply updated a pre-existing course to bring it in line with current standards in the field, but my boss would have none of this. For my part, I decided this dispute should be a hill I would die on, and die I almost did.
In the end, he backed down, but our disagreement lasted weeks and fractured our already strained relationship. The good news was that I prevented him from violating rules of academic integrity and was able to protect the faculty as well as the curriculum. But what could a small compromise on my part have accomplished? He had publicly backed himself into a position where he did not want to lose face, and I offered him no out. A great leader would have seen his predicament and offered him that out. Instead, I treated it as a game I just had to win. It could easily have gone worse than it did for everyone interested.
Collaboration
I have written elsewhere about the downside of collaboration. But most often collaboration is a good thing. On the other hand, a lot of emphasis has been placed on the power of competition to drive things forward, but the logic of competition is usually zero-sum. And zero-sum logic always leaves someone out of luck.
Collaboration, on the other hand, uses win-win logic to pool resources and ideas and achieve levels of success unattainable by any single entity.
How about a more positive example this time?
Again as a dean, I wanted to promote some of my school’s more interesting elective courses. I started putting together printed lists every semester of what I called “Cool Courses,” complete with eye-catching (and very silly) covers. This campaign was successful, and people actually looked forward to seeing our latest creation.
One of my fellow deans could be a bit competitive, and one semester she produced a rival catalog for her school called “Hot Courses.” I have to admit, that was a clever and funny send-up of my efforts. She was an artist, and her covers were the classier version of what I was trying to do.
It was a friendly competition, but we soon realized we would be better off working together. We agreed to continue separately producing our own lists of courses, but we bound them together back to back and upside down. That way, whichever way you looked at it, one of our course lists would be on top. We still competed for the most striking cover, but we were able to extend our reach to students and build our enrollments together. The friendly competition had morphed into a collaboration that benefited both our schools. We had been good on our own, and now we were better together.
Great leaders recognize and practice the 4 Cs of leadership:
Character
Communication
Compromise, and
Collaboration.
Achieving lasting success without these four qualities is possible, but it is far less likely. When you have the 4 Cs, you hold the winning hand.
How effectively do you practice the 4 Cs of leadership? Where can you improve your practice?
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