In this post:
Why you should care about (and a few ways you can effectively develop) peer leadership.
Being a leader is complicated enough even with well-defined hierarchies, but with how horizontal some organizations can be, it’s more likely you have to navigate your interactions with associates that share your level of authority.
In fact, those interactions with your peers are likely more impactful than the interactions you may have with subordinates or leaders. But, how different is the skill of peer leadership from general leadership, really?
You should find that the basics of this skill do not vary substantially from the basics of general leadership, but the application of peer leadership has its nuances.
There are three big “C”s you can approach to enhance your peer leadership ability:
1 | Competence
2 | Connection
3 | Cohesion
Competence
Simply put: Know your stuff.
One of the easiest ways to convince your peers to follow you is to demonstrate expertise. The more obvious it is that you know what you are doing, the more likely others will believe you know what you are talking about.
Similarly, one of the easiest ways to steepen the incline to great peer leadership is to demonstrate poor technical competency. Poor soft skills will also worsen your initial ability to be a good peer leader. No doubt you’re familiar with the cliché that people “don’t care what you know, they want to know that you care” – this may be an overused phrase, but that doesn’t make it ring any less true.
Things you can do:
Emphasize your education and training. Seek out a better understanding of the work you are responsible for completing and acquire more tools to tackle increasingly difficult challenges.
Seek out increasingly difficult challenges. Capitalize upon and cement your education and training by seeking ways to apply your new tools. To use another cliché, you gain much more by trying and failing than you do failing to even try.
On that note, fail faster. As you pursue greater depths of competence, you should treat opportunities to apply your skills with desperation of a sort. Failure to succeed will dramatically enhance your understanding of how those tools work (or don’t) in a variety of circumstances. Plus, the likelihood that your failures produce absolutely nothing is quite low, especially compared to the output of either not trying at all or trying less frequently!
Become someone that people seek out because you’re good at what you do.
Avoid being someone that people avoid in spite of you being good at what you do.
Connection
Simply put: Know your people.
As alluded to earlier, soft skills are important, but beyond emotional intelligence, you should take the time to learn what motivates your peers.
Also, take the time to understand some of the cultural quirks of your peers. Understanding their relationship with their families, their relationship with time, their relationship with food, hierarchy, and their own cultures – it’s all key to effective communication.
Things you can do:
Try out the FORD framework:
Ask about Family: This can provide a lot of opportunities to really understand your peers. You will likely get an idea of where they grew up, under what social norms, what sorts of values they picked up or what values they hope to pass down…
Ask about Occupation: While you may already work with or around your peers, there is still a very good chance you don’t really know what they do. Or, this category of question might reveal more than you think about your peer or the impact of the work each of you does. This is also an excellent opportunity to find new, difficult challenges or identify a gap in your skills.
Ask about Recreation: Unlike questions about family or occupation, this exploration demonstrates a more human interest in your peers. In other words, it demonstrates that you care enough to really learn about them since everyone has family and most likely an occupation, but recreational interests are myriad.
Ask about Dreams: Finally, this category goes further into learning what motivates your peers. Asking what someone wants to be doing in 5, 10, 15 years – when they’re all grown up – opens up wider perspectives as to why others do what they do.
Be careful not to turn interactions into an interrogation, and be especially careful not to switch up on your peers by turning the focus of discussions onto yourself. There should be a reasonable give and take. Reciprocate!
You may not be at work to make friends, but making friends makes work happen.
Cohesion
Simply put: Know your team.
It’s obvious but worth active recognition. What I mean when I say “know your team” is not just the understanding of what motivates your peers. I mean to learn your corporate or organizational structure and how that structure works.
Much like asking about a peer’s occupation can reveal some insights you may have lacked previously, exploring and understanding the network of your organization can accelerate your ability to lead your peers.
Things you can do:
Review your organizational charts. This will help you identify your peers, sure, but it will also generate substantial context that enables you to find inefficiencies (and thereby enhance your demonstrable competence) and partners to resolve them (because it’s likely that you will need to provide help to or receive help from someone else).
Attend meetings outside of your usual scope of work. Doing this is an excellent opportunity to learn new ways to do things and find new challenges.
Recognize the ultimate purpose of your business. While different departments are responsible for different activities, they should all be in support of some overarching goal. By synthesizing all of your peers’ work, your organization is accomplishing something big and important. Whatever that something is should always be apparent in the background of your other activities, and it should be work that prompts you to engage your peers to enhance the quality of the final product.
Understanding what your organization is designed to do enables you to think two tiers up and three steps forward.
That one time at SOS…
This isn’t much of a story, but I tend to be very organized. At Squadron Officer School, this ability to communicate and coordinate is very valuable, and it was a demonstration of competence that my flight (class) did in fact value. However, the way I communicated with my peers was too direct. I was an asset to endure rather than a peer to appreciate.
I appreciate Past Me’s attempts to emphasize efficiency and efficacy, but that guy sucked to be around sometimes. Present Me tries to be better.
This other time at OTS…
At Officer Training School, one of my flightmates was feeling nervous about our upcoming Physical Fitness Assessment. An older cadet, she was concerned that it might prove too difficult to complete – and failure did obligate elimination from the program. Having learned that she had two little ones, I successfully motivated her to view the upcoming assessment less as a matter of success or failure, but an opportunity to demonstrate to herself that she could model resilience in the face of a terrifying challenge for her kids.
I’ll admit that I didn’t even personally believe that this thought would work, but I believed in the idea of the idea if that makes any sense. Regardless, her face demonstrated some sort of internal revelation before she thanked me for the sentiment and proceeded to exercise in preparation.
From learning a bit about her, I managed to tie together her motivation for her kids to the daunting task ahead.
I think that’s all I’ve got for this month’s post.
Know your stuff.
Know your people.
Know your team.
References
7 Steps to Effective Peer Leadership
72 Airman's Writings 