This week I had the chance to be invited to a conference in Geneva entitled Talk like TED: the Power of Persuasion, hosted by the excellent communication professor Katharine d’Amico.

During her presentation, Katharine speaks about the different techniques to persuade an audience. At a certain point she gives a very powerful message: there is no need to fake your body language when you pitch or lead, as people will feel it.

That triggered the title of my second article of 2020: leadership. Today it is a trendy buzzword to toss around, expressing that you need this soft skill in order to raise in ranks in a corporation. I disagree with this interpretation, since we most often confuse the added value of a leader and that of a manager.

A manager will have a tendency to consider the workforce of a company as expendable resources. I always saw that a manager treats employees as a line in a excel sheet: they are part of the Gross Margin (number of Person Days sold in a company), a cost (SG&A) and a turnover (how many employees have left). She pushes orders down the line of command and doesn’t take nor expect initiative to be taken. Delegation is sparse and inspiring employees might be non-existent, as she considers them as a conglomerate rather than individuals.

Is that wrong? Not necessarily: it depends on the industry you are working in, what is the state of growth of your team and what is the strategy of your company.

Let’s take an example: a local manager of a fast food joint.

Her workforce will be composed of unskilled and young individuals on minimum wage. The company career path is not well defined for them and her KPIs focus on the area of sales, operations and marketing.In order to reach her objectives, she needs to define a process that:

• her staff can easily follow [reduce training]
• serves a great number of customers per shift [improve sales and reduce operation cost]
• standardises the quality of the product and service [improve customer satisfaction and operation costs]

In this case she doesn’t care so much about the individual in the workforce as anybody could follow a simple standardized process and can be easily replaceable. A good manager could run this fast food joint effectively without being a leader.

On the other hand, a leader sees her teammates as individuals with unique skills, professional courses and traits.

This vision enables her to inspire, persuade, communicate and delegate to her team.
It gives the workforce opportunity to grow, creating a bond between team members and their leader.

Having good leaders has many great benefits for a company, among others:

• higher synergies within teams and departments
• reducing turnover rates
• building career paths
• constructive feedback that can give you an edge toward your competition

However, there are different types of leaders: depending on the sources, academia has identified between 4 and 10 types of leadership styles. I like this article describing the 7 most common ones (autocratic, democratic, coaching, strategic, transformational, laissez-faire, charismatic). A leader won’t use only a single style but will change it according to the audience, the strategy of the company and her own vision.

Let’s return to the fast food joint manager from the previous example. If she wants to get promoted to the next regional manager, she needs to learn more about delegating her tasks (laissez-faire), understand which employees are important and coach them (coaching) and gather constructive criticism from her team about how to improve operational processes and better understand the customer’s needs (democratic).
She still needs to put the pressure when work needs to be done or if the quality of the service is going down (autocratic).

By being more than a manager and by inspiring people, she will also be able to have an edge over competition, since she can modify products thanks to the information gathered by her team.

Leading is not for everyone: as you should not fake your body language during a presentation, you should not aspire to be a leader without appropriate competences. You might be able to read a book or take a course on the subject of leadership, but that is just the theory.

In my personal opinion, you need a lot of real-life practice, understanding empathically your team and people around you. After a few years of doing mistakes and gathering experience, you can start to see where your leadership style is stronger and with which people you can work with and inspire.

But don’t forget to be a good manager first: understand the operation, sales and customers of your company and work on top of it; if you want to be a successful business person, try to blend management skills with leadership skills.