If you were to write the job specification for the ideal CEO of your company, what qualities would you put first? Picture the best boss you’ve ever worked for – can you name three things that made them great? The chances are that you have named some of the typical sought-after leadership qualities – motivational, engaged, trustworthy, focused or similar.
Going back to the CEO question – what experience would you want them to have? Maybe experience of transformational change, perhaps evidence of turning a company around. However, are you concerned about their experience within your industry?
Think about Richard Branson. His ventures include record shops, restaurants, airlines, train companies, beverages, telecoms, gyms and even space travel (this is by no means an exhaustive list either)! What Richard Branson has been able to do is apply his leadership skills to a range of industries and use them to drive his brand forward.
Let’s take Virgin Atlantic, Richard’s airline company, as an example. Virgin Atlantic came about as a result of Richard getting stuck in Puerto Rico when his flight was canceled due to not having enough passengers to warrant the flight. Richard then chartered a plane himself, and went around the airport encouraging the other frustrated passengers on the canceled flight, offering them discount tickets to fill his plane – and so the seed for the airline was born.
Did Richard have a background in aviation? No. Did he have the leadership skills to make it work? Most definitely.
In an age where technology, methods of working and ways of communicating with customers is constantly evolving – the ability of a leader to be adaptable is of the utmost importance. Someone who may have experience within an industry may find that the needs of the organization change very quickly.
For example, I worked for Avis Budget Group. When the company chose to collaborate with other organizations in order to develop new smartphone applications, I was not an expert in that technology but had the ability to lead teams, define the customer journey and collaborate with the right partners to identify and implement a self-service product. My leadership skills allowed me to listen and learn but lead the team to identify and implement a product that changed the way we did business, despite not having smartphone app implementation experience.
I was lucky to work with an organization that understood that I had what it took to think outside of the box and motivate others to achieve success. They continued to see these qualities in me and chose me to lead many other initiatives based on my ability to lead and develop new products.
Look at some of the most successful companies in the world – and you’ll note that their leadership teams come from some pretty disparate backgrounds. If you think about the companies from which you would love to recruit – what are the qualities that make their employees so desirable? Disney employees – great customer service. Google employees – innovative. You look at the values, and not necessarily the experience.
It is these leadership qualities or lack thereof which can make or break an emerging manager within a company. Someone who is promoted as a result of their depth of experience in relation to say, a technical role, may lack the leadership experience to be able to motivate their team, or look beyond the day to day aspects of the role – overlooking things such as how their team fits in with the company as a whole. That is not to say that these skills cannot be taught – they can, however, if this is not addressed early on, and new leaders given the tools to understand how to lead, the results can be extremely demotivating for both the emerging leader and their teams.
The inverse of this is rarely true. If a new employee with relevant leadership experience comes into a new role where they do not have industry experience- it’s a given that they will need to learn more about the company, its products, and services. As an outsider, an experienced leader with good skills is easily able to spot both opportunities and threats to the business as they are able to take a step back and see the company as a customer, an investor, or a shareholder would.
It is therefore clear to see that, while industry-specific skills can be picked up easily – for a product or service to truly succeed – leadership values are the key to true success.
Angela Barbato is an award-winning Change and Transformation specialist. Having held a range of senior leadership roles at Avis Budget Group, Angela is a foremost expert on the topics of leadership, transformation and customer experience. You can find out more about Angela at http://www.abarbato.com.