Five Habits Great Leaders Share: Clarity, Consistency, Connection, Courage, Celebration

How simple check-ins and acting on the answers build employee engagement at every level

By Austin Holmes, Co-Founder & President, Publicity For Good & Signal Raptor / Host of OverPressure Podcast

Focus Insights

• Employee engagement starts with asking people what they need and then acting on what they tell you.
  
• Strong leaders tend to share five habits: clarity, consistency, connection, courage and celebration.
  
• Feedback every quarter gives people time to adjust long before an annual review.
  

Chatting with Julia Rock, and asking her how organizations keep their teams engaged at every level, she told me the answer is simpler than most leaders expect. Her advice is to ask your people what matters to them, since a lot of leaders guess what their teams need and never ask.

Julia spent her corporate career in finance at JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil, and her last role put her over a portfolio of about $23 billion in operating expenses. She started out helping friends and classmates for free in college, later charged $75 a résumé, and now runs a leadership development company and works as a certified executive coach. She has seen leadership up close inside those companies and through clients who loved their jobs and couldn’t stand their managers.

This one hit close for me. We’re building out our second layer of leadership right now, and the early coaches who shaped our culture taught us that a steady feedback cycle is part of it.

Ask Before You Plan the Outing

Julia has little patience for forced fun, and she means the eighth trip to Dave & Buster’s and another round at Topgolf. Her alternative is a direct conversation. Share what you’re seeing, then ask how it feels to them, what support they need from you and what would help most.

Two things happen when you do that: people feel seen because someone asked for their input, and if you act on what they said, they can see their influence on how the company runs, which gives them a real reason to care. A pizza party nobody asked for can come across as a pat on the head to someone who really needed an obstacle removed or better resources.

I love Topgolf myself, and our early coaches taught us that the feedback cycle is part of what builds culture.

Five Basics of Uncomplicated Leadership

Julia’s book lays out a philosophy she calls Uncomplicated Leadership. Looking back at the leaders who thrived in her career and the ones clients complained about, she found the great ones did five things well, which were clarity, consistency, connection, courage and celebration. She shared the ideas on Substack first.

Her goal is a shared language that everyone in a company can use, from the executive team to a new hire. When the vocabulary stays simple, the same principles apply to change management or any other challenge, and a new leader can pick them up quickly without months of outside training. Repeatable sayings and systems have made good leadership easier to duplicate in our business.

Courage Starts With Admitting What You Don’t Know

The part of courage Julia thinks gets overlooked is vulnerability. Plenty of business owners keep up a front that everything is handled, and that performance costs them real connections and the help they need. Saying “I don’t have this one” out loud is the kind of courage she means.

She also describes courage as a willingness to stand alone. In corporate, she watched senior leaders go along with bad decisions so they wouldn’t be pushed out of their group. A business owner may face the same test, and holding to a conviction can put revenue or customers at risk.

I tell our team to do the right thing a couple of times a week. For founders, courage also means admitting when we’re the bottleneck and letting a capable team run.

Frame Tough Conversations Around the Work

Julia’s view is that most hard conversations go badly because of how they’re framed. When someone has to be let go, she keeps the discussion on what that person contributed and the gap between where things stand and what the role needs. The person may still be frustrated, and they’ll understand the decision is about the work.

For feedback conversations, she opens with a request for help. Telling someone you want to improve their experience and need their perspective to do it lowers defenses and turns the talk into a joint effort.

Shorten the Feedback Cycle

Julia recommends Dare to Lead by Brené Brown and The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran. We moved to the 12 Week Year about two years ago, and the shorter horizon forces prioritization and keeps the team moving. Julia added that it lets feedback happen every quarter, so problems have already been worked through by the time the annual review arrives.

Key Points on Employee Engagement and Leadership

• Asking employees directly what support they need, and acting on the answers, is how Julia Rock recommends building employee engagement.
  
• Julia Rock’s Uncomplicated Leadership framework centers on clarity, consistency, connection, courage and celebration.
  
• Framing a hard conversation around contributions and the gap in the role helps people hear it without feeling attacked.
  
• Quarterly goals and feedback, as in The 12 Week Year, let teams correct course before annual reviews.
  
• Julia sees most generational conflict at work as people wanting the same things at different stages of life.
  

Start With One Conversation

The version of this I keep coming back to is how little it costs to start. Pick one person on your team this week and ask what would make their work better, then act on one thing they tell you. Julia’s advice for leaders starting out fits here too, because mistakes come with learning, and she encourages giving yourself grace while you build the habit.

Watch the full episode with Julia Rock and other episodes of the OverPressure Podcast on Spotify and YouTube.

——-

About the Author
Austin Holmes is a Navy Special Operations veteran, father, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and President of Publicity For Good and CEO of Signal Raptor, a SaaS-enabled PR platform that modernizes one of the most traditional industries by productizing services and pairing technology with human expertise. He hosts the OverPressure Podcast, where he interviews veteran entrepreneurs about building businesses under real-world pressure.