How to Become a White Hat Leader
A White Hat Leader is someone who aspires to be the best they can be and help others achieve the best in themselves for the benefit of a common mission that in turn benefits everyone involved. It’s the same for small businesses as for large corporations. The size of the organization doesn’t matter; only the principles involved.
Being the best you can be means being not only a great performer on the job, but also developing the sense that you are meaningfully contributing toward achieving a worthwhile goal, ideally using your highest and best talents.
The primary job of a White Hat leader is to create an environment in which people learn how to become their best, feel valued for it, and flourish. Here are the seven principles that must be learned and applied to become a White Hat leader:
1. Value, Engage, and Empower your Employees
Employee engagement is not a new concept, but many organizations don’t walk their talk. Too many leaders still view their employees as interchangeable pegs in a pegboard, and justify this view with the reasonable belief that no one is indispensible. How many employees will be inspired to perform to their capacity by these managers?
This first thing a manager must learn is to stop trying to motivate employees. Using contests or awards that involve prizes or money sets up competition, which has unintentional consequences. Motivational techniques are short-lived, will be “gamed” by shrewd employees, often to the detriment of overall productivity. For example, I once consulted with an insurance agency that paid their agents commissions only for selling new policies. As a result, the agents let existing customers wait for service while moving new faces to the head of the line. Even worse, a few agents cancelled existing policies and wrote new policies when a simple change to the existing policy was all that was needed, which wasted the agency’s time and money. Motivating employees with money is almost never the answer.
White Hat leaders inspire their employees. Inspiration requires a clear vision that is clearly communicated so that everyone understands both the mission and how their efforts contribute to it. Inspiration requires honesty at all times, providing balanced feedback that recognizes good performance and provides methods to improve sub-par performance. Moreover, it requires treating employees as equals, with respect for their time, opinions, and their humanity. It means creating an environment of trust where people feel comfortable expressing their authentic selves instead of who they think the boss wants them to be. It requires stepping back and allowing employees to suggest and make incremental improvements to the work process and the level of service provided to customers. Good employees are just like you – they do their best work when that work is the product of their own imagination. They are motivated by bringing their own creation into reality. It’s your job to align them with the Corporate Mission and Goals so they can create their own ideas in support of yours. Get rid of the formal command and control model. Give people room, treat them well, and allow them to succeed. Oh, and don’t forget to inject some fun into the mix. It’s amazing how well people respond to a nurturing environment.
All this will take time to implement. Managers ingrained in the old, formal ways of thinking will be highly resistive to change. They may even try to sabotage any attempt to alter the status quo. A White Hat leader needs to assess their managers’ degree of openness to learn and apply new ways of working with their people, and if necessary, replace those that refuse to embrace the new ways. White Hat leaders do not tolerate lack of integrity in their organizations. Managers and employees who are continually disruptive and uncooperative with others through political posturing or stepping on others must be called out. They must either choose to recognize, own, and change their behavior or be replaced.
Being an inspirational White Hat leader is a lot more work than being a motivational leader, but the joy that comes from transforming the workplace and the people is more than worth the effort. Oh, and expect productivity to go through the roof, which means that more profit will be available for implementing all these principles.
2. Provide Extraordinary Customer Service
Your customers may be individual consumers, entrepreneurs, or other businesses. Regardless of who they are, they expect you to be available to answer their questions and help resolve their issues in an efficient manner. If you have an automated call center system that sets up a maze of options and requires callers to enter information that gets asked again anyway, get rid of it. Your customers should be able to speak to a person who can help them without being transferred multiple times.
How is it that Zappos, a company with over a billion in annual revenue, can provide this level of service and be extremely profitable; while other billion dollar companies make it almost impossible to speak to a human? Do you believe your customers are so loyal that they will stay with your company despite sub-par customer service? Given a choice, your employees want also choose to provide great customer service, so get their feedback and let them be part of making whatever changes are needed to make your customer care extraordinary.
3. Value Integrity
Our culture is far removed from the days when a person’s word was their bond and a handshake closed the deal. Our risk-averse, fear-based legal system has made it difficult to enter into the most trivial of endeavors without lawyers and pages of legal documents. Don’t misunderstand; we still need to take responsible actions to protect the interests of everyone involved in our organization, but we need not allow cultural distrust to influence the way we personally communicate with others. We should enter into every agreement with the belief that the other party will hold up their end of the bargain, regardless of the legal process that goes on behind the scenes.
White Hat leaders should strive for win/win agreements where both parties feel good about doing business together. Win/lose transactions are dangerous and reflect short-term thinking (see #4). We should plainly say what we mean, and do what we say. The products and services we provide should be as advertised and nothing less. Don’t allow sales and marketing to embellish features or capabilities beyond what you can deliver. And if something isn’t right, don’t become defensive and enter into conflict. Better to own up to it, apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused, and offer something that will make it right.
4. Take the Long View
Too many companies are driven by the desire to meet short-term goals and objectives influenced by nervous financial executives, boards of directors, investment analysts, and shareholders. How can a company commit to meaningful long-term goals when funding may be pulled at any time or the powers that be decide to change course every quarter? Long-term sustainable profits and growth is what makes companies great, and that usually comes from a clear long-term vision of where the organization is going. White Hat Leaders have the fortitude to stand up to those who would sacrifice the mission for the sake of short-term gains. Is your organization in business for the short-term or the long-term? If your answer is the latter, your culture should reflect it.
Here’s an example. A company I recently consulted with made the decision to replace their 30 year old mainframe system with a modern web-based system that would provide a good return on investment and provide much better capabilities. The problem was that every time a department head complained about a deficiency in the old system, the company diverted its resources to resolve that problem, thus interrupting the development of the new system. This pattern had been ongoing for a long time, and it not only pushed back the benefits of the new system, but also reduced the morale of the programming staff. A White Hat leader knows how to keep an eye on the prize and artfully deal with those who would jeopardize its fruition.
5. Never Stop Learning and Improving
The best organizations are profitable because of the preceding principles, but they don’t stop there. White Hat leaders invest in the future of their organizations, their people, and themselves. It’s important to do industry research to keep up with new developments, trends, and forecasts. The way business is done today is unlikely to continue as is for very long. It’s essential to Investment in new ways of interacting with and serving customers. Likewise, employee skills must be continually reinforced and updated to implement new and better methods of doing business. They will definitely appreciate the investment you make in them. You also must continue to learn and most importantly, to ask your managers and staff what you can do to help them.
6. Use Money Wisely
White Hat Leaders use profits to benefit the organization and employees, invest in research and training, and voluntarily give back to the community. Leaders that greedily keep too much for themselves provide a poor example of how to live and what’s really important. I briefly worked for a company where the owner took out so much for his personal use that there was never enough to pay the current bills, let alone pay down the debt he had incurred. His behavior was not only observed, but emulated by his employees, who used every trick they could find to put company money in their own pockets.
White Hat leaders are grateful for what they have and for the ability to help others less fortunate than themselves. White Hat leaders do not pursue money for its own sake or to acquire symbols of wealth, but rather to enjoy the rich life experiences that money affords them, and to share as much as possible with others.
7. Be Real
White Hat leaders are real people, even humble, who value the process of building and nurturing their company, employees, and their own humanity. They know who they are and are content with themselves. They express themselves authentically without the need to put on an identity or persona to impress others. They are thoughtful, and even if they disagree with someone’s opinion they are open to inquiry into the grain of truth that may be there. They have no need to feed their egos. Their behavior is even and predictable. They avoid strong emotional displays, whether positive or negative.
People always know where they stand with a White Hat leader, and are never surprised by sudden reversals of behavior or temper. People who work for White Hat leaders are inspired by them, and do their best to emulate what they see the White Hat leader doing.
What kind of leader do YOU want to be? What kind of example do you want to set? What kind of organization do you want to build and lead? For the sake of the world, I hope it’s a White Hat leader.
