Early in my career, I was fortunate to work in Australia, a country that gives all employees a three-month holiday after ten years at the same company. Wonderful as this was, it came at a difficult time for me: I had a new boss, and I wasn’t feeling very secure in my job. Nonetheless, I set off for three blissful months exploring the outback with my family in a camper van. When I returned, I expected to be fired. Instead, I found that my team had excelled, and my boss was very happy with them - and with me. This experience taught me a valuable lesson: much of what I’d been doing previously as a leader was probably unhelpful. I decided to double down instead on things that could help my team achieve even more, rather than diving into details on things they could do perfectly well without me. Research shows that my experience wasn’t unique. Leaders who focus on helping their teams are consistently rated as highly effective. Micro-managers and people-pleasers are not. The research also suggests that leaders are often unaware of the impact their behaviour has on others. Taking a few months off is one way to learn about your impact, but it’s easier just to ask! Earlier this year my company, Transforming Engagements, started gathering feedback for leaders in Rwanda using a survey from Human Synergistics International called Leadership/ImpactÆ. So far, we’ve received feedback from the reports, peers and superiors of 26 leaders. Most of these leaders are executives, nearly half are female and the majority work in finance, public agencies or the service sector. A very positive result from the feedback is that Rwandan leaders rank in the top 20% globally for encouraging constructive behaviours that are associated with high leadership effectiveness (like achievement and development). They also encourage aggressive defensive behaviours that reduce effectiveness (like competition and opposition) at levels slightly above average. Passive defensive behaviours are also associated with low effectiveness, and these are well above the norm for the leaders in our sample, especially conventional which ranks in the top 10%. Conventional behaviour prioritises adherence to rules, discourages innovation and maintains the status quo. The overall profile of our leaders suggests that they may be working at cross purposes, encouraging beneficial and counterproductive behaviours at the same time. Leaders’ actual behaviour is often different to what they themselves see as the ideal. In our data, this is apparent with conventional and competitive behaviours. Competitive behaviour is focused on outperforming internal rivals at the expense of collaboration. Leaders encouraging competition motivate people to exaggerate their achievements and undermine the performance of others. In their own survey responses, leaders said it was ideal to encourage conventional and competitive behaviours at a level below the global average. But respondents rated them as above average on both. We also saw differences in behaviour between leaders that respondents rated as most effective and those rated as least effective. The most effective leaders encouraged less competitive and less oppositional behaviour than the least effective. Oppositional behaviour includes being hard to impress, elevating your status through fault finding and blaming others for performance problems. Interestingly, there wasn’t much difference between the most and least effective leaders on passive behaviours like conventional. This suggests that passive behaviours are hard to change or not strongly associated with lower effectiveness in Rwanda. The findings above are consistent with anecdotal evidence I’ve seen in my consulting practice. Leaders that try to introduce new initiatives in Rwanda can face a wall of resistance. Colleagues seem very quick to explain why innovations will fail or displease important stakeholders. There’s also a low tolerance for failure, with great attention paid to achieving short-term metrics and much less to developing ideas that could transform the company’s long-term fortunes. The key message from this research for any leader in Rwanda is to take comfort that you are already doing many of the things necessary to make your organisation successful. To reach the next level of leadership effectiveness you should probably do less, not more. Give people space to experiment and do things their way, even if this makes you feel uncomfortable. Reserve your judgement for the rare things that are truly problematic and look past little details that really don’t matter in the greater scheme of things. If my experience is anything to go by, you will be delighted by what your team comes up with when you stop interfering in their work. And you will have much more time for the people that matter most in your life. The writer is a is CEO of Transforming Engagements (TES) Ltd, a Kigali-based consultancy that helps organisations prosper through positive leadership.
