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Being a powerful leader requires making tough decisions, but the best principals lead out of love for their team – not from fear.
This is the message that Margot Faraci preaches in her work as a speaker, writer and mentor on leadership. With two decades of experience as a corporate powerhouse for some of Australia’s largest banks, Ms Faraci knows her way around the block.
“When leadership is done well, it can change lives,” Ms Faraci said. “I learned that throughout my leadership career, and now I want the rest of the world to know.”
One of the pitfalls that Ms Faraci believes is plaguing many Australian leaders is fear-based decision-making. Anxiety about exposing yourself to criticism, hurting teammates’ feelings, or lowering business success can, according to Ms Faraci, result in mediocre performance.
“In our culture, fear manifests as avoidance,” Ms Faraci explained. “When you nod along in the meeting but don’t buy into the decision, you’re operating from fear. When you hold onto the really nice underperformer or the toxic high performer, you’re doing it from fear.”
So what’s the alternative? In Ms Faraci’s experience, the most sure-fire route to a flourishing business is “love leadership”.
Not to be confused with doormat leadership, leading with love means loving your business enough to make hard choices and take risks.
“When you are ruthless about who you choose to be in your team, you’re operating from love,” said Ms Faraci.
Love leadership also means catching underperformance early, and “getting curious about it, understanding why someone is the way they are, and then working out whether there is a path to being better”.
For those seeking to transform themselves into more positive, productive leaders, Ms Faraci said that the first key step is to be more honest in meetings.
“Be the boss who get told they’re wrong a lot,” advised Ms Faraci. “Invite debate. Make sure it’s respectful, not blamey.”
“When I have a big problem to solve, I get the team together and tell them I’ve called the meeting so I can run my solution past them and they can tell me what’s wrong with it.”
The second change leaders should make is to “listen to understand, not to respond”.
“Your experience is not everyone else’s experience,” Ms Faraci said. “When you’re hearing something that makes you uncomfortable, resist the urge to react and instead ask three more questions.”
Finally, Ms Faraci warned that love leadership always starts first with yourself. Despite normalisation of long working hours in sectors like real estate, Ms Faraci noted that “falling into long hours actually demonstrates a lack of discipline and an inability to prioritise”.
“Recovery is critical to high performance,” said Ms Faraci. “If you think long hours are starting to impact your wellbeing or your important relationships, the good news is, you can take charge and start setting boundaries.”
Ultimately, Ms Faraci noted that no one will create healthy work/life boundaries but yourself.
“You need to be your own boundary cop,” she concluded.
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