How the best leaders make everyone smarter

Take a step back and think about the people you have once worked under… Who inspired you and why? Who motivated you to want to work better and harder? What was it about these leaders that made you want to be the employee of the month?

Good leadership in turn makes for a strong and progressive workforce and it’s your leadership abilities that can make or break your company. Liz Wiseman (a leading mind in strategy and leadership forums for executive teams worldwide and Author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter) knows this all too well.

In fact, so well, she believes that all leaders can be placed into two distinct categories – multipliers and diminishers – with the truly unaware being what she refers to as accidental diminishers.

A multiplier is someone like George Sheer:
“George grew people’s intelligence by engaging it. In a typical meeting, George only spoke about 10% of the time. He would “crisp up” a statement of a problem and then turn his team lose on it to find an answer.”

While a diminisher:
“Drains intelligence, energy, and capability from the people around them and always needs to be the smartest, most capable person in the room. These managers shut down the smarts of others, ultimately stifling the flow of ideas.”

So, which one are you? And before you come to your decision, bear in mind that accidental diminishers often believe that they are multipliers at heart… (Click here to find out if you may be an accidental diminisher)

Multipliers get so much brainpower from their people that they essentially double their workforce for free. Meanwhile, Diminishers are costly. Sure, these Diminishers can get the job done, but they come at a very high cost. Why? Because they waste talent and intellect.

As companies shed excess resources, the need for leaders who can multiply intelligence and capability is more vital than ever. Leaders who are weighed down by enormous challenges and work demands might just find that the organization’s new challenges can be met, not by re-hiring more resources, but by better utilizing the brainpower that currently exists in their organizations.

Liz Wiseman suggests that it’s the most encouraging team leaders that set the speed for an entire company. She calls these people multipliers as it’s their pace which enables a business to grow.

We’ve heard it all before: You can only go as fast as your slowest player. However, in business, this idea can be turned on its head – it’s these Multipliers, as Wiseman calls them, who set the speed – and as a business you will go as fast as the inspirational pace that these people set. It’s important to be a strong and inspiring leader (and to employ these people) for several reasons, but influencing, encouraging and therefore multiplying the growth of the business around you is the most important of all.

Within any company there should be a leader in a position in which to inspire others – someone that other team members learn from and excel under and those that inspire others to learn and to succeed.

Liz Wiseman distinguishes the attributes of “Multipliers” :

• They use their intellect to make people around them smarter.
• Other members of staff and the company in general find that they grow around their leaders.
• They have an enthusiasm for asking questions.
• They set the tools for finding the answers to those questions.
• Encourage those around them to want to learn more.

The suggested ways in which you can inspire your people do to their best work consistently:

• Leaders know how to utilize latent talent and discretionary energy.
• They do this by asking for more from people (in instances where people are overworked yet under utlilized)

For Wiseman, the most important skill of a leader is not what they know, but how they access knowledge from people who know more than them. A multiplier doesn’t have the answers to everything – no one does. However, they will do their utmost to find out the answers and to share this knowledge with others.

Wiseman also outlined that on the other end of the scale from Multipliers, we have the Diminishers:

• They require twice the resources
• Limit the growth of your company
• Cost just as much money and are less profitable

Managing these people is a matter of how you manage the growth and scale of your business. You need to get the most value out of the people you have (without terrorising them) before you outsource. You also need to have a clear idea of who in your business is a Multiplier and who is a Diminisher.

The main differences will be that one will see the genius in others and use it, will be more intellectually curious, will listen, will adapt to new situations and will create an environment in which well thought-out risks can be taken.

By Liz Wiseman

For more information about the author visit The Growth Faculty .

Find out how Optus can help you build your business with a great range of solutions designed for business builtforbusiness.com.au .

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