Eight commandments of great leadership

TL;DR - Lead by example, be passionate and understanding, set goals and trust your colleagues!

Listen

Thou shalt listen to thine colleagues

Honestly, this one hits home differently. A great leader doesn't just listen and nod their head, they give you their full attention and understand what you're really saying. In this age of text | call | meeting notifications, we aren't short of distractions. You should make it a point to dedicate your full attention to whoever you're talking to. I can't put into words the disappointment I feel when I see one of my leaders eyes drifting away during a dialogue only to be responded with generic 'mmms' and 'aaahs'.

I can't believe I need to say this, but I do: If you're approached by your colleague for a quick question of brief discussion, put away your phone, look away from your screen and into the eyes of your colleague. Of course in the age of remote meetings this can be translated as: keep the video chat window focused at all times, don't look at other stuff while you're listening.

Set goals

Agreeth on goals based on your collective interests

Setting and following up on goals is a much discussed topic but I'm not going into detail on the hows, but rather the why. It helps you and your team take some abstract ideas of a desired future state into something actionable and potentially measurable. The goals should ideally take all your interests into account and be formulated in such a way that it can be broken down to smaller timely chunks of work, and optimally measurable. This way you can together formulate a plan where you'd follow up the goals and the progress at regular intervals. The expectations you have will be discussed and no surprises await e.g. when you have a salary review the next time. It's been very clear for both parties during a whole year how things have been progressing.

Empower

Thou shalt act as a guiding beacon

Being the great leader that you are, you should of course try to empower and enable your talented colleague to achieve their goals. Setup regular follow-ups where you discuss the progress and if there is anything you can do to help them achieve their goals and aspirations. There are a lot of ways you could be of help, e.g:

• find a specialized mentor who could help them grow in a certain area,
• provide access to continuous learning for relevant courses that are interesting.
• setup a book club at the workplace and get your colleagues to self-organize.

If you're the greatest of leaders, you should let them do these courses as part of their work hours. Investing just two hours per week results in ~90hrs per year, and could be the spark which ignites the flames of innovation. It's a win-win which hopefully could help with reducing employee churn as well, since these types of benefits typically increase employee satisfaction.

Be passionate

Thine passion should overflow onto thy team

If you're passionate about your work, chances are you're going to attract passionate co-workers. In the best of worlds it triggers a positive feedback-loop where you'd pick each other up when you're experiencing downs. This one is more difficult to provide concrete pointers for, but imagine the case where you have a monotonous leader who talks about their company and common goals only on special occasions with little conviction. Now imagine someone who is determined and energetic when presenting their many ideas and possibilities week after week.

Adapt

Surfeth the waves of change

As a leader, you're expected to stay on top of things. The world is ever-changing, and the pace keeps on accelerating. Just imagine these billion dollar giants which have gone bust: Blockbuster, MySpace, and recently LG Mobile announced their shutdown. Now, I'm not implying that they failed due to bad leadership or failure to adapt to change (well that was actually the case with BlockBuster), but you could with enough insight probably find symptoms of not following the trends or trying to board hype-trains too late.

It is imperative as a leader to lift your gaze and keep an eye on trends and upcoming companies, while trying to understand what separates them from the pack and makes them great. You also need to be able to drive change and get your colleagues on board as well.

Trust

Entrust thine colleagues with their tasks and they shall overcome

Honestly, your colleagues managed to go through a cohesive people-filtering process and they were hired for a reason. Delegate hard and delegate often! Trust that they will deliver, but make sure to follow-up their progress from time to time, especially concerning larger tasks. Not because you don't trust them, but just to ensure they're on the right track, and to remove any blockers in their path.

Balance and Enjoy

Engageth in team activities

Show your colleagues that it's possible to have a work-life balance, and encourage your team to strive for it. Work already takes up so much of our time, both in actually being at work but also it's sometimes living rent-free in our minds long into the night. One way of doing this is arranging casual kick-off-style meetings where the goal is to simply be together and do something other than work. Playing board games, meeting up at a bar, trying your skills at an escape room are just some examples of activities. Team-building is very important for your wellbeing and it most likely improves team performance. Hopefully it also results in less colleague churn and less time spent onboarding new members. The fun times are what keeps us going through tougher times and will also leave lasting memories long after you're no longer working together.