Experience matters in leadership, but evidence is the key

Isn’t it ironic that people who have no idea how to do a job, have a defined opinion about it?

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Isn’t it ironic that people who have no idea how to do a job, have a defined opinion about it? Whenever I contemplate this, I think of all the medical advice that is given between friends, when none are a practicing physician. I would fear to learn how poor their diagnosis rate is.

The idea of having a “single perspective” opinion is especially evident when it comes to leading. I’ve never met an employee or leader who does not have an opinion about what a leader should do. Yet very few are trained, let alone classically trained on how to lead. It seems that experience, good and bad, is accepted as leadership expertise.

Have you ever considered how you learnt to lead?

The responses are incredibly fascinating when asking leaders how they learnt to lead, not how they lead. I do what is called a leadership experience interview that is designed to understand how someone learnt to lead and potentially identify areas for further growth.

One day I asked a very senior leader: “How did you learn to reduce ambiguity and make complex situations clear?” I’m still puzzled from his response. “Oh I learnt that from Walid, my boss in 1995,” he stated, matter of factly. I’m curious if Walid was doing it well, not so well, or even if it could be improved upon. In this instance, the logic appeared to be: “If it’s good enough for Walid, then its’ good enough for me.”

Are you like most leaders; did you learn to lead via exposure — copying what you liked and attempting to do the opposite of what didn’t settle well with you?

The method that you now use may in a board sense be said to be an evolution representing the survival of the fittest and best of the leadership ideas that you were exposed to.

Each one of us were conditioned to lead by observing what others did, through the many years in which our perspectives have been developed from the naivety of the early stages of a career when we may not have known better. In a corporate “ancestral” sense, we practice the rudiments of what was handed down. In essence, adhering to an each-to-his-own view on leadership.

This approach becomes increasingly dangerous. If your approach to becoming a leader comes from your experiences, and my approach from my experience and the 20 to 50 other leaders in a company of 1,000 employees do the same, we have a concocted approach to organisational leadership.

This has created the present state of the growing subdivision of leadership approaches, in which each leader practices his way.

As an example, the Google chief executive Larry Page says Sundar Pichai, the new chief of Google’s Android division, “has deep technical expertise, a great product eye, and tremendous entrepreneurial flair. This is a rare combination, which is what makes him a great leader.”

In essence, this is how Larry Page describes leadership: Mr Pichai has earned the right to have an opinion, albeit it is still built on his experience.

Yet, his definition is greatly different from what Stephen Elop former chief executive of Nokia says: “The leaders who catch my attention are those who form points of view, can effectively communicate those views and then put them into practice.” We could continue this exercise with numerous examples.

You may be wondering, is this a problem? Isn’t individuality good? It’s a good question and gets to the real point that I want you to consider.

Only those who are intimately acquainted with leadership practices are fully aware of the fact that there is hardly any uniformity in the methods that are used. Instead of having only one way that is generally accepted as a standard, there are in daily use, say, 50 or 100 different ways of leading. And a little thought will make it clear that this must inevitably be the case, since our methods have been handed down from man to man by word of mouth, or have, in most cases, been almost unconsciously learnt through personal observation.

Exposure and experience is not what makes science credible; evidence is what is mandated. The same holds true in leadership, you need an evidence-based approach to leading.

Tommy Weir is a leadership adviser and author of 10 Tips for Leading in the Middle East and other leadership writings. Follow him on Twitter: @tommyweir.