I recently attended the Global Business Travel Association Convention in Atlanta where I attended several educational sessions and keynote presentations whose messages echoed far beyond “business travel.”
Most notable was Carla Harris, senior client advisor, Morgan Stanley, who spoke about leadership. As a Black woman who’s worked on Wall Street for four decades, Harris said, “I’ve learned a few things about not only surviving but, more importantly, thriving in the seat that you’re sitting in—or the seat that you aspire to sit in.” Through this experience, she has cultivated her “eight pearls” of “what it means to be a powerful, impactful, influential leader in today’s environment.”
Recognizing that today’s workplace environment is very different from the one she grew up in, Harris sought a way to connect with her colleagues. It’s no longer about keeping your head down and working hard, knowing you’re doing a good job only by remaining employed; nor can managers take the “my way or the highway” approach with employees.
(Photo by Tim Fuchs)
“I realized we had people sitting in the leadership seat that were brought up during a different leadership context [who are] now responsible for leading, motivating and inspiring people who are from a very different generation. I also realized that leadership does not happen because you have 37 years in the business or because somebody promotes you,” Harris said. “Leadership happens because you show up intentionally for your people every day.”
No matter the field, that last sentence rings true. Whether you are the CEO of a $100 million company, the owner of a boutique agency or an IC with administrative staff, you need to be conscientious about the way that you present yourself as a leader. It can be easy to fall back on what you know, but to foster a cohesive team that you can build into leaders in their own, you might need a new approach. Consider Harris’ “eight pearls of leadership:”
1. Be authentic: Your success depends upon your ability to successfully penetrate relationships [and] the easiest way to penetrate a relationship is to bring your authentic self into that environment.
2. Build trust: Every leader … will need somebody else’s intellect, somebody else’s experience and access to somebody else’s network … But the only way that your teams will give you the benefit of their best thinking, allow you to leverage their previous experience and invite you into their network is if they trust you.
3. Create other leaders: It is imperative that you focus on creating other leaders, for that is how you amplify your impact in the organization.
4. Create clarity: It is your job to define what success looks like for the team. For when you fail to define what success looks like, you create a tremendous amount of frustration on the food chain.
5. Be intentional about diversity: Whenever you have homogenous thinking at your decision-making table, you will have a gap in your go-to-market strategy and it will expose you unnecessarily to outsized competitive threats.
6. Innovate: How do you teach people how to innovate? You teach them how to fail, because if people are deadly afraid of failing, they will never reach far enough to truly innovate.
7. Make your team feel included: You simply solicit other people’s voices … [And] not only [do] you invite them to the conversation by name, but you invite them specifically to support or refute the argument that’s on the floor.
8. Use your voice: You must be willing to call a thing a thing, no matter how bad the thing might be, and … the worse that thing is, the more important it is that you give voice to it. When you fail to give voice to it, you are impairing your authenticity and, more importantly, you are not being transparent.
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