I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mike REA, CEO of Idea Pharma, to talk about his perspectives on leadership and learn a little about his leadership style. I want to outline some of the insights he shared.
You can never have enough information to make a decision.
Confidence in one’s own uncertainty is a key part of how leaders should be making decisions. In many organizations, one rises to the position of leadership by being good, being confident, making decisions, and sometimes, by knowing more than those below them in the organization. However, Mike believes – and I agree – that one should ideally rise to leadership roles based on their ability to make decisions across the breadth of what’s known and unknown, while acknowledging those different factors in as transparent a way as possible.
Managing one’s uncertainty within the realm of the decision being made is much more important than having to know all of the answers. Trying to make decisions based only on what is known, or by making assumptions without considering the other possibilities, leads to an ultimate state of idle paralysis where you are stuck doing the same things you were doing before. People forget that you can’t possibly know everything you need to know in order to make the best possible decision – in fact, you can almost never have enough information to make a perfect decision, so eventually you are going to start wasting time trying to collect information when.
There’s a line to walk between information gathering and structured decision making, and being as honest and transparent as possible about the knowns and unknowns as you make a decision is the most important part of crossing that line.
Above all else: Be curious.
You can’t have layers and silos and divisions. People can have good ideas wherever they come from, and as soon as you stop listening then you stop succeeding. In the same vein, anyone can ask questions outside of their domain of expertise, and they can ask them of anyone. It’s about being okay with saying things that are maybe not wholly stupid questions, but to someone who really knows their stuff might be considered stupid questions. And on the other side of the question, that other person needs to be okay with explaining that concept.
What we find over time is, sometimes the people who think they know the answer, when challenged, are also interested in going further on and learning more – they just hadn’t thought of the scenario in a certain way before.
One of the key things as a consulting group is that you can’t just give your clients the right answer. That would be a remarkably arrogant thing to do. Instead, you want to bring them possibilities and ideas that they may not have thought about before. Fostering a culture of humility changes the nature of the dialogue from a “who’s right” conversation to a “who’s the most interesting” conversation, which is a much nicer environment to be a part of. It means that people are going to bring their best selves and curiosity to the table. As soon as anyone becomes overconfident in any assertion, the group should be quick to challenge that.
Cross pollination breeds innovation.
It’s critical that individuals bring not just their skill and discipline within their domain to the group, but also their lived experience beyond that. The people Mike says he tends to like working with the most are those who talk about music or film references, or the books they’re reading – people who enjoy creative pursuits outside of the work environment and can bring those with them into the office to help communicate, share ideas, and explain concepts. A lot of what we do as humans is based on metaphors, analogies, and the ability to communicate in different ways. Sometimes our individual lived experiences are strengths that help get the team on the same page.
As a leader, you get a lot of your strengths from those around you. The second you try to beat individual contributions out of someone is the second you start to fail. It’s a lot more fun turning up to a group of people with varying interests and the ability to turn those interests, their skills, and their lived experiences into useful tools in the workplace than those who are just good at spreadsheets or good at science.
Look for team synergies
Within your team members’ individual lived experiences is where you can find the parts that will make your team stronger than the sum of its parts. Synthesizing the brilliance of your team members starts with digging a couple of layers deeper into someone to find what makes them unique, what they’re passionate about, and what they know a lot about – beyond the realm of what they need to know to do their job.
In order to be a great artist you have to be interested in a lot of different things, and to see the world from different perspectives. You have to bring the individual strands of your life together and use them together to produce art. The same thing happens with teams; there’s a synthesis of the component parts that determines the success and strength of that team. As a leader, your job is to discover how you can make a team better than its individuals.
Create safety for your team to be brave.
Something that is lost in so many teams is that they don’t feel that it is safe to experiment. This goes for team leaders as well; we think we have to know the answers, and we have to produce, otherwise our job and success is on the line. But innovation can’t happen in an unsafe environment. Team members must feel they are safe to be brave, to take risks, to try new things, to speak up, and to change the mold without fear of being scolded, looked down upon, or judged. That’s the quality of environment that good leaders embrace.
Creating the safety to be brave means fostering the desire to disrupt and pursue without fear. Your people are employed, but at the same time, there’s bravery to try new things, and those new things may be what changes the game.