When you see geese flying along in “V” formation, you might consider what science has discovered as to

why they fly that way. As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird immediately following.
By flying in “V” formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird
flew on its own. People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are
going more quickly and easily because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.

When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone —
and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird in front. If we
have as much sense as a goose, we will stay in formation with those people who are headed the same
way we are.

When the head goose gets tired, it rotates back in the wing and another goose fly point. It is sensible to
take turns doing demanding jobs, whether with people or with geese flying south. Geese honk from
behind to encourage those up fronts to keep up their speed.

What messages do we give when we honk from behind? Finally — and this is important — when a goose
gets sick or is wounded by gunshot, and falls out of formation, two other geese fall out with that goose
and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the fallen goose until it is able to fly or
until it dies, and only then do they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with
their group.

If we have the sense of a goose, we will stand by each other like that.

Even the most sophisticated psychometrics and people analytics have yet to make
leadership development more science than art. Competence, character, creativity, and
charisma remain difficult qualities to quantify, let alone cultivate. Growing effective
leaders is challenging work.

But maybe we’re measuring the wrong things. When entrepreneurs, innovators, and
executives describe the kind of leaders they want to be and/or hire, an unhappy truth
invariably emerges: The attributes they so admire often aren’t the behaviors they
display. Their truisms lack pragmatism.

Fortunately, a simple question evokes greater self-awareness and actionable insights

than the typical 360 degree review: How do you lead by example? That means asking
leaders to detail instances and anecdotes where their actions set standards for others.
What do they actually do that influences and inspires?

I’ve found no better diagnostic for promoting authentic revelations around personal
leadership style and substance. For one, it non-judgmentally presumes people already
lead by — and thus set — good examples; for another, it pushes leaders to think harder
about how others interpret their behavior. Truly credible answers require both empathy
and introspection.

INSIGHT CENTER
  Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders

How talent management is changing.

In over 15 years of asking, no one has ever said they can’t, don’t, or won’t lead by
example. To the contrary, executives always — always! — volunteer lead-by-example
stories and vignettes they felt revealed something important about themselves. Their
answers exposed their expectations (realistic and otherwise) about how their actions
would be perceived by colleagues, clients, investors, etc. Charm and charisma are
wonderful, but good examples can prove as persuasive as great presence.

Serious leaders understand that, both by design and default, they’re always leading by
example. Some want to “lead from the front” while others prefer “leading from behind.”
But everyone senses their success — and failure — at leading by example is integral to
their “leadership brand.” Smart leaders want to build their brands. The lead-by-example
stories executives tell sharpen their leadership brand propositions.

The critical first step: Encourage people to list the three most important — or effective —
ways they lead by example. Talk about them all you want but — ultimately — they must
be written down in shareable form. Those answers begin building productive paths and
platforms for leadership development. Here are a few examples from my work with
executives:

 A Silicon Valley start-up CEO attended his company’s diversity/inclusivity

training workshop for the entire day. “Everyone needed to know I took this
seriously,” he said.
 A manufacturing executive pointed to her on- and off-site Spanish lessons so she
could better communicate with her workforce.
 A senior project manager cited the highly public immediate dismissal of a direct
report who had fudged a quality control audit and then lied about it.
 A founder/entrepreneur immediately pointed to promoting the college drop-out
into a senior management position over an MBA. He wanted his people to value
performance over credentials.
 A managing partner at a global consulting firm makes a point of coming to the
office straight from red-eye flights and radiating productive energy.
 At an Asian company, a hard-charging intrapreneur/executive referenced flying
to a valued customer in Europe for a week to make sure a novel instrument
installation worked as promised.

These brief examples share the revelatory self-belief that they merit admiration and
emulation. They actively — not just verbally — communicate values the leader
personally and professionally believes important (else why make it a lead-by-example
story?) They’re intended to define leadership behavior in the enterprise.

Whether HR or executive coaches elicit the lead-by-example story matters less than how
they’re used to transform leadership development discussion and design. Three key
elements invariably dominate:
  Content: What do the selected examples say about the leader’s values and
priorities?
 Influence: What influence and impact do the examples actually have on people’s
perception and behavior?
 Reciprocity: How do one’s bosses, colleagues and direct reports lead by example?
How do their leadership examples impact and influence our own?

Lead-by-example content is both mirror and window into leadership sense-of-self.

Examples that stress talent development signal radically different priorities than
disciplining malefactors or displaying kindness during family crises. Examples
celebrating costs cut or waste eliminated over innovations launched or opportunities
explored speak more eloquently than any mission statement. Leaders must explicitly
know whether their examples are over-weighted along some dimensions versus others.
For example, lead-by-example stories that only emphasize customers may be as
distortive as those that never do.

Similarly, the pragmatic beauty of lead-by-example interrogatories is how quickly they

translate executive introspection into easily testable hypotheses about influence. Do
employees take enterprise diversity/inclusion initiatives more seriously? Are people
refusing to cut corners on quality? Will innovators literally go the extra thousand miles
for their early adopters?

The true lead-by-example test is who follows those examples and how. Do colleagues
and clients see those examples as leadership? Are direct reports inspired to admire and
emulate? When people describe “the right way” of getting the job done or getting the
best out of people, is an example explicitly referenced? These questions aren’t rhetorical;
they’re central to meaningful and measurable leadership development.

That’s why inconsistency and hypocrisy so acutely matter. The executive who is always
— always — unapologetically late to his own meetings evokes eye rolls when his lead-by-
example stories stress “respect.” Similarly, I’ve heard 40-minute lead-by-example
answers from global business unit leaders who never once referenced a single customer
or client — even as their firm declared its strategic intent to become more “customer-
centric.” Following up with a polite “So how do you lead by example when it comes to
serving customers?” provoked a painfully awkward silence. That said, that executive
almost immediately sought coaching from some of his world-class account executives.

That’s what makes reciprocity so powerful. Examples are as much about exchange as
influence. That’s why lead-by-example examples must ultimately be incorporated as an
essential leadership development metric. Serious leadership development doesn’t just
ask leaders to know how they lead by example; it challenges them to be aware of what
leadership examples inspire and influence them.

Making real world examples rather than aspirational attributes the focus of leadership
development leads to more concrete conversations and healthier outcomes. Asking
direct reports Is your boss a good leader? or Does she care about your professional
development? or Do you get appropriate feedback? obscures essential leadership
dynamics. Conversely, insisting that employees describe How does your boss lead by
example? yields behavior-based insights consistently more valuable than a Myers-Briggs
test.

Identifying and communicating those core and critical leadership examples is at the
heart of a healthy enterprise culture. Determining if there are even better ways to lead
by example is central to a healthy culture of leadership development.