The Entrepreneur Insiders network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in America's startup scene contribute answers to timely questions about entrepreneurship and careers. Today's answer to the question," What leadership style should every entrepreneur try to adopt?" is written by Andy Lark, chief marketing officer of Xero.
Understanding what leadership style works for your personality and being consistent is what every entrepreneur needs to do to drive an organization forward.
The key isn't what you choose to do – it is what you choose to do consistently. The only way to understand what leadership style works with your team is to ask for real-time feedback. Ask your team after your next one-on-one how they experienced it – did they get value from the conversation? Do they feel you heard their challenges and concerns? Seek feedback and journal actions. Distill those into no more than three clear leadership actions you plan to consistently implement across everything you do. These should be the most significant skills or actions you plan to nurture.
Around these three actions will be other smaller actions you need to work on. Leaders are human. They mess up. The more human they are, the more they mess up. Some argue that if you aren't messing up, you aren't pushing hard enough. But messing up means cleaning up.
Central to making progress is establishing clear metrics that function not only as a finish line, but also a constant reminder of what you need to do. So, if you plan to develop quality, high-performance relationships with your direct reports, you might set a goal of consistent one-on-ones that result in constructive conversations and clarity on progress of objectives and key results. To do this, you might develop a simple spreadsheet to remind you of the one-on-ones and on which you score their quality. Instrumenting leadership behavior changes the quality of that behavior.
As a leader, it’s crucial you identify the behavior you most want to see in your leaders – you will become a reflection of them, and they of you. For me, that quality is humility, which helps you understand that, no one person will ever have all the right answers given the complex world we live in. You don't learn from others, or your mistakes, unless you're humble enough to understand this.
Humble leaders ask for feedback or constructive criticism and they listen when it's dished out. They admit their mistakes and aim to empower teams. They show courage by being comfortable with calculated risk and failure.