Credibility and Leadership

Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.
--Dilbert (Scott Adams)

In business one of the key assets anyone in a decision making capacity has is "credibility." Simply put this is the chance that what you say will be believed and that your assessment will be given weight. Credibility is how you "manage up."

The second is Leadership--the quality of making people want to play on your team--to follow you. Its essential components are interaction skills with peers and subordinates and the ability to execute successfully (project management skills, organizational and morale building, and real domain in whatever you are doing--usually at a superior level). Leadership is how you "manage down."

Credibility

At its most basic, it has two distinct components (three if you count "fear" -- but you rarely do): visible track-record (with projects and people-appointments) and force-of-personality (a combination of presentation style, communication skills, mystique, and charisma). Title alone does not guarantee credibility. Track-record alone does not (see the "visible" qualifier). Intelligence, ability, and a good argument are not synonyms for executive credibility in the sense I mean it.

If you are lacking credibility then you will have trouble "managing upwards." If you are lacking credibility your peers in the organization will be able to overrule you. Credibility is essentially your "firepower" when it comes to affecting change in the organization--power when it comes to enforcing your will up the chain of command.

Burning Credibility
Credibility is almost like a tangible asset. You can "expend it." Any time you vouch for someone in a tight spot you are spending it (if you associate yourself with a loser, you lose credibility). Any time you hire or appoint someone, you risk it. People see comedies where the boss won't fire a poor performer because "it'll make him look bad for hiring him." People who are not in a management environment think this is ludicrous. I did. It isn't: hiring is wagering credibility--the higher the hire, the more the wager.

In order to challenge a peer or a higher up you must risk credibility: this is why your boss, on your say-so, does not rush out like Don Quixote to wage your war. They know that their ass is on the line ... not yours. Yours can't be because you are not high enough level. You feel unsupported and your boss thinks "This guy wants to play bumper-cars with my career ... nice."

Every argument is a risk of credibility--being in the fray. If you argue, debate, or dissent there is danger. So executives spend it carefully. They insulate themselves from decisions with management layers.

Gaining Credibility
If you do not have credibility you can gain it. You can gain it by sheer performance if it is visible and credited to you (both of these are harder than you think: you must publish and celebrate your successes more than most people realize). You can gain credibility by divorcing yourself from failure (if everyone around you loses credibility, you look good by comparison). If you see an executive ready to distance themselves from a project see if they know something you don't.

You can be feared if you are both smart (or smarter) than people around you and use that as a weapon. I have seen it done: making your peers look stupid in meetings can be very impressive. It also makes you hated--so be careful with that.

If you are an "unknown" people will be wary of you. The newly brought in executive has a grace period of high credibility and can usually make some unpopular decisions in that time. If they squander it, they're toast. If you are a consultant you have instant credibility because you are an outsider who is not subject to the power of the organization. You don't care who you upset since your career isn't there.

If your personal affect is one of cool-headeness combined with sudden fiery positive passion you can find that people want to ally themselves with you.

Myths About Credibility
I think the relevant one here is that you do not gain credibility by being fact based. You do not gain credibility by being "merely good at your job" (or even very good). Having your people love you does not make you credible.

Facts say what the speaker wants them to (like statistics). Total knowledge is a myth and at a certain level up, everything is synopsis (and therefore potentially "spin"). The guy making executive decisions can never understand the problem at the level of the engineers who deal with it--so they must trust (or not trust) the presentation of it. This presentation, no matter how rigorous, does not look to them like the unvarnished truth. It looks like a sales pitch from someone with an agenda (executives hate nothing more than being presented with a problem and being asked "what do we do about it?"--so the presenter always has a recommendation and the executive tries to determine if what they have been told both makes sense and seems to have any lopsided consequences such as giving all the headcount to the guy making the presentation).

Being smart is not credible by itself. No matter how smart you are no one will believe you have your senior executive's career in mind when making decisions: you have your own first and foremost (if enlightened self-interest leads you to support your superiors, though, you will go far). The element of trust--person-to-person trust--is crucial here and that's on a more personal and emotional level than sheer intelligence.

Being good at what you do is not enough. You are usually not the entire solution to the problem--there is a network of people you must work with and there are the executive's peers and superiors that must be considered. One person's say-so is rarely the big picture no matter how good that person is.

Charisma, Communication
The final, crucial point about credibility lies in communication skills and ability to connect with people. Gut reactions are part of the human experience: People respond best to positive energy. How well you communicate is at least as important as how good your ideas are. Executive communication is a key part of credibility.

Leadership

The quality of leadership is making people want to follow you. In order to achieve this you have to convince them that (a) you are invested in the effort with them and (b) you will lead them to success. At some point people will need to trust the leader and they want to feel they can. People want to be heard by their leadership and valued. If you can manage all of that, people will follow you anywhere.

Leadership means responsibility: not just in the ethical "spider man" sense but in a literal "You are the leader, you suffer if the project fails" sense. If you are not on the line for the project (or work-efforts within it) you are probably not the leader.

Dysfunctional Teams
Teams can often become dysfunctional and when they are it's the job of the leader to sort things out--that's why they have authority. It isn't because some executive wants to see people bossed around it's because if the team structure collapses you need someone to try to salvage it or at least do damage control. That's your leader. You also need someone to break ties, make agile decisions (i.e. decisions without taking the time to gather and debate all the facts) and set policy. You need someone to model appropriate behavior and work-ethic for the team if things go badly.

None of that happens without a leader and a leader backed up by actual authority is far more potent when things go south.

Dysfunctional Leaders
Leaders can be bad as well as teams. When this happens the executives who assigned them lose credibility. This is incentive for them to assign better leaders but the cycle is not always fast enough to catch up with them (or, they may be owners or top executives and it's, unfortunately, always the captain's prerogative to steer their ship into an iceberg).

I have never seen anyone at a lower level of management successfully overturn a bad leader. I have seen projects fail and leadership get replaced. I have seen cases (and been them) where because of proper documentation, when the project fails people who dissented are rewarded with new positions.

I have never met an executive who was of a mind that things could be improved by removing the current leader and installing the junior guy instead. In every case I have seen them simply hire from outside the firm. I believe this is because no matter how the new guy pans out it wagers less credibility.

My advice is to document everything and prepare to leave if necessary while still doing what you can to support the bad idea (note: this does not apply to abusive leadership. That situation must be dealt with immediately through HR, management escalation, or immediate resignation).

A Note On Criticizing Leadership: If you are going to criticize leadership it must be done in a very specific way. Firstly you must do everything you can to understand their point of view--if you believe they are "simply stupid" you are in trouble. Secondly, you must criticize in an "elevator pitch"--making long complex ("fact based") arguments will not communicate well if the stakes are high. If the message is necessarily long, structure it as an actual presentation (a work-plan for success, a description of risks, not a criticism per se).

When asked about leaders saying that that "they do not listen" or "are not logical" or "are argumentative" are all bad things to say. Imagine that anything you say that is negative like that will be heard as that applied to you.

-Marco