Good leadership is critical. We talk about it all the time. That’s why, when I got a chance to interview Alain Hunkins, I was excited to learn more about this crucial area affecting every business — whether for better or for worse. Alain is the author of a book called Cracking the Leadership Code: Three Secrets to Building Strong Leaders. Here are some of the highlights from our conversation. I hope you enjoy it!
The Impetus for Writing
Alain has been working with leaders in the corporate world for almost 25 years. Over time, he said, you start to see patterns of behavior about leaders. “And so I started taking notes, I’d hear stories, I’d do interviews and work with people. The notes turned into blog posts and, ultimately, the blog posts turned into chapters. And then the chapters turned into this book.” He realized that all of his years of firsthand, fly-on-the-wall experience could help other people who desire to lead well. Alain’s book, then, is “a practical distillation of all of that knowledge” so that people can accelerate their leadership growth and shorten their learning curve.
Leadership Hurdles
“Too many leaders end up in their jobs because, frankly, they were good at a task.”
When I asked how people find themselves leading ineffectively, he opted to give me an example. He said, “You were a really good salesperson. Because of your success in sales, you were promoted to the position of sales manager. In this case, you may be good at a task, but you haven’t been trained to lead people. Rather, you’ve been trained at the function or the task. These two jobs require two totally different skill sets. You can’t just rely on the things that got you to where you are. If you try to do what you did, you’re not going to succeed.” This is the first hurdle.
The second involves coming up with a leadership plan and modeling good leadership. Our knee-jerk reaction to such a challenge is to think back to an effective role model in our own lives. Unfortunately, though, this instinct can backfire. According to Alain, “most leaders have inherited a leadership legacy or a playbook, if you will, that dates back to the early 20th century. It was designed for the Industrial Age, and that playbook only worked well in a factory where 95% of people were doing repetitive tasks on a factory line assembly line. It doesn’t work in the knowledge economy that we’re living in today.”
From Zero to Hero
Next, I asked Alain to tell us about a district manager named Matt that he discusses in his book. Alain recalled, “Matt works in retail. When I met him, he was the number one out of 100 managers. I asked him if he had always been number one and he laughed at me. He told me he was actually number 84 for years. I asked him what changed?”
Matt told Alain that, when he started, he thought his job was to be the fixer. He would look at the key performance indicators, and he’d run off from store to store telling the employees what they needed to fix. This didn’t work very well. Alain added, “He only thought in terms of tasks and problems, but what Matt failed to realize was that he was dealing with people. Matt realized that people don’t want a fixer; they actually want a leader. They want to know that you care about them.”
Instead of going into task mode, Matt switched his strategy. He would take time and ask the store employees questions about their lives, build relationships, and make connections. Then, he would ask them how they would approach the problems that needed to be fixed. “Instead of turning it into this tell-push monologue, Matt actually tried to pull and create a dialogue. And guess what? He found that people started to step up and create their own solutions.”
An Epic Failure
It was time to talk about a hard lesson learned for Alain. I began, “So I think it was 1999, and you were running for an executive director position. You thought you were going to win against your competitor, Gary, but you lost in pretty much a landslide. Tell us about your conversation with Gary following that election.”
Alain responded: “I’ll never forget this moment in my life. This was my epic failure. I had been working with this not-for-profit for three years. And, in my mind, I was a shoo-in for this job. We had this election, which was basically an annual meeting where anyone could show up. Gary’s only been there six months, no one knows who he is, you know? So the election happens, and I get creamed. I think I lost something like 38 to 6 votes. I couldn’t believe it. I met with Gary a month later and somewhat jokingly asked, ‘Gary, did you expect to get all those votes?’ I expected him to blow off the question, but he responded, ‘I did,’ and he was dead serious. I asked him how he did it. He responded, ‘I reached out to people. I got to know them. One-on-one, I actually went out for lunch or for coffee and asked them about themselves. Then, I asked them why they were involved in our organization, what they would do if they were in charge, what they would change, what they like, and what they’d keep. And then based on that, I shared with them my vision for why I was running. I told them, I had this vision of a whole team of people working together. And I asked them to show up on election day and vote for me.’
Alain recalled how he felt his “brain exploding and this blinding flash of the obvious.” He was laboring under the delusion that “good work should speak for itself,” but it was connections that made all the difference.
Taking a Look in the Mirror
According to Alain, this epic defeat taught him about how to develop the self-awareness necessary to be a good leader. “Part of that is our willingness to press pause every so often and ask ourselves if we’re willing to take an honest inventory of what went well and what would I do differently. And some of us are better geared at that than others.”
To look in the mirror means you have to be willing to put your ego aside, Alain explained, because the tendency is to think more highly of our abilities than we ought to. Alain said, “I had to find people who would give me honest feedback about how I show up in my behavior — people who aren’t going to say what you want to hear.”
The Three Secrets and More
Alain’s book outlines the three secrets of building strong leaders: connection, communication, and collaboration. If you want to learn more about practical ways to build your leadership skill set with these secrets, go grab a copy of Cracking the Leadership Code: Three Secrets to Building Strong Leaders. You won’t regret it. The book is just jam-packed with tactical ideas for effective leadership, and this interview only scratched the surface.