Traits of the best managers and leaders I’ve ever worked with.
In this episode, I share 8 non-obvious traits that made the best managers and leaders I’ve worked with so special.
Check out the full transcript at https://foundersjournal.morningbrew.com to learn more, and if you have any ideas for our show, email me at alex@morningbrew.com or my DMs are open @businessbarista.
What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder, and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am breaking down non-obvious traits in great leaders. Let's hop into it.
So if this topic sounds familiar, that's because it is. Last episode on Founder’s Journal, I shared with you six non-obvious traits that made the best people I've ever worked with so damn good.
If you haven't listened to that episode, I'd recommend you check it out after this episode. I think you'll really enjoy it. Now, this episode is similar, but it's more focused. I'm going to share with you the eight non-obvious traits that make the best managers and leaders I've ever worked with so special. Let's start with number one.
Number one is self-awareness and open to admitting fault. This is a massive differentiator between good and great leaders. There are so many good leaders I've worked with that are great workers. They're great producers, but because of that, they have dangerous confidence. They believe they're good at everything. And they have an unrealistic picture of their circle of competence. As a refresher, circle of competence refers to what you know, and less important than having a large circle of competence is understanding its boundaries. So you don't unknowingly spend time making decisions or doing work on things that you don't know. And this isn't just important for the professional to do great work because they're spending time within their areas of expertise and also being able to identify when to delegate and ask for help. It's also this quality that makes someone coachable, approachable, and primed for growth. Think about it this way. If a manager believes that their direct report is self-aware and knows when to admit fault, they will be so much more likely to provide feedback and support because psychological safety is created by the employee's awareness that makes the manager feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. Lack of self-awareness is self-sabotaging and prevents a person from experiencing compounding career growth.
Number two, the best leaders are decisive in the face of uncertainty. One of the first lessons that I learned as an entrepreneur is that 90%, at least 90% of the choices you make are not black or white and you need to learn how to thrive in the gray. Now, this is something that is drilled into you out of necessity when you're thrust into building a startup. But oftentimes it isn't something that professionals learn how to do because either speed is not an absolute necessity if you're in a bigger company or decision-making is outsourced to someone higher up in the chain of command. The best leaders I've ever worked with have this founder-specific skill of working with the information they have, not getting plagued by analysis paralysis, and making many educated decisions that are almost never definitively right. It's their confidence that I described earlier and one other trait that I'm going to describe in a second, that makes them excited by taking many smart bets, bets that oftentimes they're willing to bet their job on.
Number three, information hoarders and signal finders. The best leaders that I've ever worked with are able to take educated bets because they are great at information hoarding and signal finding. You've probably heard the old Irish proverb, God gave us two ears and one mouth so we ought to listen twice as much as we speak. But there's a difference between hearing and practicing. And I would say most people love to hear the sound of their voice and signal their smarts through spewing information to others, the best people and the best leaders don't care about stroking their ego in this way. They are exceptional at keeping their mouth shut listening, especially when it's outside of their circles of competence, retaining what they hear, and sifting through the noise to identify the information that actually matters. And I've even noticed this little thing that many of these great leaders do when I have conversations with them. We'll be having a conversation. They will be talking about something and I'll think that they're done speaking so I start talking, but then I realized that they're not done speaking. They try to start speaking at the same time. And so I go ahead and say, sorry, no, finish your thought. I'll talk after. And what they always do without fail is they end up saying, no, please go ahead. I love to hear what you have to say. And obviously part of that interaction is them trying to be respectful and show that they value my thoughts and opinion, but I also just think they're wired that way. They're wired to hoard information that could be valuable whenever possible.
Number four, the best leaders balance operational excellence with compassion. And this trait is a perfect compliment to being impeccable with your word, which I talked about last episode. The vast majority of amazing operators that I've worked with really struggled to balance operational excellence with compassion and the reason being they think about everything in terms of efficiency. And what that does is it makes them great at building well-oiled business machines. They are highly effective, but what's missing is the emotional element: compassion, but this is a blind spot for most exceptional operators. The only way to keep the well-oiled business machine spinning is with people feeling empowered to do great work. And they do that when they are excited by the mission. They're excited by the people they work with, and they feel supported by those around them. The best leaders marry efficiency and effectiveness with emotion and compassion.
Number five, the best leaders marry pattern-matching with intuition and gut instincts. The best people use experience to solve repeat problems, set strategy, build teams, and see around corners, but it never stops them from going with their gut if there's no pattern to match. And David Epstein talks all about this in his book, Range. He talks about how people who have a lot of experience always actively look for patterns to inform the decisions they make today. Said differently, they are trained to think inside of this proverbial box that they've been trained in. And by the way, this can be a really helpful thing. Thinking inside the box isn't always bad. When Austin and I hired senior leaders at Morning Brew, we saw how much leverage was created for us by bringing on people that had an established playbook for setting strategy in their specific area of expertise and laying out a hiring roadmap based on past organizations that they've built from scratch. But sometimes experience can be blinding. It can create overconfidence and lead to experienced people misreading what's happening in the business as a pattern that doesn't exist. It can cause them to make suboptimal decisions or draw from a prior experience when actually the best answer is to use your intuition and take your best educated guess based on the set of totally new circumstances. And that's important to remember. Every business is different. There's a lot of crossover for sure, but you can't copy and paste everything you've done previously.
Number six, the best leaders have common sense more than they have super high IQ. The best people I've ever worked with are not the smartest people I've ever worked with. And I actually believe in the majority of cases, intelligence and performance are not strongly correlated. I think every top performer has to have a baseline IQ that's not as high as one would think. And then above that base level performance is entirely based on things not related to their IQ, whether you call it street smarts or common sense, the best people have that base level of IQ and then the rest of what they do intellectually is driven by logic and common sense.
Number seven, the best leaders are exceptional explainers and they're the best explainers because they're the best understanders. They understand the industry, their job function, the processes within the business at their conceptual and fundamental level. And that allows them to explain things in a way that makes sense to others. They don't feel the need to cover things up with jargon or excitement or being verbose, because they know what they say is simple truth and they know others will be able to understand this. If you're trying to think about how to apply this for yourself, here's a simple test to understand if you're a good explainer. In a normal business day track the number of times that someone asks a clarification question or says I don't understand. And then at the end of that day, revisit those instances and just ask yourself, is there a way that you could have explained whatever it is you were explaining to them where they didn't have to ask for clarification or tell you they didn't understand the thing?
Number eight, the final non-obvious trait of the best leaders: No task is beneath the best leaders. The best people understand the difference between delegation and laziness. They delegate. If they're not uniquely qualified to do something. They delegate so they have the most leverage to add value to the business. They delegate because they think what they are delegating will help the person they're delegating to in order for them to learn and grow. But when push comes to shove, if someone calls out sick, if something just needs to get done and no one else is there to do it, they will never hesitate to roll up their sleeves and do the task. And it reminds me of this story about the New Zealand All Blacks. The New Zealand All Blacks are the most iconic rugby team in the world. They have the highest winning percentage of any professional sports team at 77%. And the All Blacks have a team mantra of quote, sweeping the shed. And basically what this is, is it's a tradition that says that no individual is bigger than the team and its ancestors and everyone on the All Blacks is responsible for the smallest details, which includes cleaning out the locker room after training or a match. And sweeping the shed is your job as an all black team member, no matter who you are. Going back to work, it is so easy to get comfortable as a manager spending your whole day running meetings, doing one-on-ones and delegating responsibility. But the best people know that the best way to manage is to make sure your team succeeds. And that is by building trust, doing whatever it takes to get the job done, and understanding the jobs of the people you manage. In order to do that, you'll inevitably have to do tasks from time to time that don't perfectly square up with your job description.
And those are the eight non-obvious traits of the best leaders I've ever worked with in my life.
Now I'd love to hear your thoughts. When you think about your best boss or the best CEO you've ever worked for, what specifically, get as specific as possible, made them so special. Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista. Also make sure to pound the subscribe button for Founder’s Journal on Apple, Spotify, or the podcast player of your choice. It is the number one way for us to grow the show and it is how you can find out about content when it drops. And if you already subscribe through the podcast feed, make sure to subscribe on YouTube. Go to YouTube search Morning Brew, and click on our channel. There, you'll see an entire playlist of Founder’s Journal videos, like how to deal with imposter syndrome, which I’ve experienced my entire career, and why Ethereum matters. Finally, I want to give a massive shout out to the people behind the scenes that make this show possible. Our show is produced and engineered by Dan Bouza. Our associate producer is Bella Hutchins. Brian Henry is our executive producer. Alan Haburchak is Morning Brew’s director of audio. Holly Van Leuven is our fact checker. Noah Friedman is our video producer and editor. And I'm your host, Alex Lieberman. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.