Leadership Guide: Dos and Don’ts
Let me start with a story. There was an experiment conducted at Google some time ago: they decided to ask teams what are the most important traits they would like to see in their leaders.
Naturally, like many companies of similar type and size, Google has their own established leadership model. It gets revisited or updated every now and again, but overall, it’s pretty standard. The responses from employees—subordinates of the leaders in question—revealed lightyears of difference between the expectations and the model in place.
So, why did I start with the Google case study? It will serve as a vantage point to understanding that expectations from leaders are of a dual nature. They are not only directions from the board or decisions dictated by major business priorities. They are also current demands from employees who represent the very culture of the organization and its values.
Every company at a certain point of its development needs to establish a “toolset” for team leads, heads, and managers to build their leadership model on. This should be a framework of priorities that reflects the company’s strategy as well as its key values, and at the same time resonates with the leadership style within the organization.
A few years ago, I presented a set of expectations from leaders. Ten expectations, to be exact. You’d perhaps argue that we cannot limit expectations to ten, and you’d be right. But it is crucial to create a framework of priorities for HERE and NOW that will help to keep focus and be tailored to actual business needs. Let me guide you through my “toolset” that was created with Semrush in its current phase of development in mind.
1. Develop your team and teammates
Providing and asking for feedback is a key tool to grow expertise within teams and departments. It is important to think in a complex way: what skills are needed for the growth of the business, and what skills will be needed in the future. Having such a complex approach in mind, you can help your team to advance and create a development plan for your employees—development that’s needed for their growth and for the business’s sake. If we don’t think about what is ahead of us, we lose.
2. Have a long-term plan
When you have the future and business needs in mind, you can start tailoring your decisions to a 3- or 5-year plan. Yes, the future can be unpredictable (especially at Semrush, where change is literally part of our DNA), but planning means having different scenarios for all possible cases of development. You might change the direction or the path, but you need to have this one “final destination” in the future that you are certain about reaching. Having a plan is critical—it grounds us and helps us achieve our goals more effectively by connecting today and tomorrow.
3. Start, adjust, and stop the processes
To reach that point in the future, we sometimes need to sacrifice outdated processes that we’ve been following just because “it’s the way it is.” We need to stop asking why we are doing something (because “why” is about the past) and start asking what for. If we don’t have a clear understanding of what this process is for and how it benefits us, it might be a sign we need to adjust or drop it. Processes are there to free up time for exciting tasks, not the other way around.
4. Drive the execution
This expectation was specifically added with Semrush’s current phase of development in mind. We are not a startup anymore—we are a public company with certain policies and processes in place. In such a phase, it can seem easy for leaders to regard their role as a mere executor. And that would be false: each leader is an actor—the subject, not an object, of any process. Once you have your long-term goals established, you are the one in charge of outlining the strategy and driving its execution. When developing the plan, you must already have an understanding of the way your team will achieve goals, have critical milestones planned, and establish key metrics to evaluate the results.
5. Don’t stop experimenting
Experiments are natural drivers of change. We care about sustaining a high concentration of experiments at Semrush, also because our company is so innovations-driven. As a leader, you need to be open to experiments, but have a clear understanding of why you are doing something (remember: a subject, not an object!). You are in charge of creating a free environment where each employee feels confident to suggest and implement ideas and test their hypotheses empirically. Even if the experiment fails, you will have data and analysis that you can base your future decisions on.
6. Start with yourself
“Be an example for employees.” ”Lead by example…” It sounds very obvious, but let’s face it—many of us are not our best selves in challenging situations or under pressure. We suddenly behave differently. What I face a lot as CHRO is when leaders have high expectations of their subordinates, but don’t adhere to the principle “Do as I do, not as I say.” One piece of advice from me is: be accountable for your actions and do exactly what you demand from others.
7. Motivate
This is very closely related to the previous point. One thing is certain: nothing motivates as much as a self-reflecting leader. And highly motivated employees can move mountains. So share plans, explain cause-and-effect relationships, ask your team about their opinions, and above all, trust them.
8. Guide with balance
Again, this expectation is related to the leader's own example. Balance is key. Leadership is not about only celebrating achievements or only punishing failures; the right way is somewhere in between. Leaders need to have an understanding of how to retain critical employees and keep their expertise in the company, but also how to be attentive to the team's current mood and support their work-life balance.
9. Support collaboration across Semrush
Collaboration is so important, especially at the current stage of our company’s development, because it simplifies decision-making: when employees and teams can agree on their level, no escalation to management is needed. This is about asking others for help and offering help yourself. It also has to do with delegation. When you delegate decision-making and drive collaboration, you create an environment for trust, which is treasured as our key value at Semrush.
10. Control the quality of communication
Last, but definitely not least, is communication. To me, it is perhaps even one of the most important expectations. Yet at the same time, I see that the role of communication within and between teams is often underestimated because it evokes uneasy questions: How to do it right? What is now seen as toxic and what is now seen as acceptable?
Communication, though, is a gradient; it’s not about being good or bad, it’s about being appropriate for the given situation. A task of the leader is to oversee all communication, instead of just expecting it to “simply happen”—especially if they have dispersed international teams and employees who come from very different backgrounds and communication styles.
Communication is also a key indicator of the company’s culture—you can understand how the company operates based on communication. By the way, feedback is also communication, and we need to approach it the same way.
This is just a set of suggestions that can be adapted and applied to a certain extent, based on the size, type, and phase of development of your organization. But we don’t live in a vacuum and face real-life challenges and ever-changing circumstances—leaders might experience difficulties in setting expectations “the right way” or even sticking to them. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Expectations from leaders can often be controversial
No matter what type of leader we are talking about, there will always be expectations. Some might expect that leaders will think globally while executing locally. Others pay more attention to soft skills, matching with the team, and overall societal appropriateness. For example, a leader might be expected to share a work ethic while at the same time being responsible for less popular decisions that they’ll execute for the sake of business with no added emotions.
Most typically, the leader is expected to be a strategic thinker: a visionary in a way, someone who understands from the get-go what direction should be taken and how a goal can be reached.
The model of leadership is often built based on external factors
The difficulty of any paradigm of expectations from leaders—no matter the company, the rank, or the present issues—always mirrors the current context both within the organization and in the world. The executive team or the board decides the direction, while the leader needs to not only adopt it, but also set directions for the team.
If the company is a start-up, flexibility and agility go ahead of anything else. In such cases, many resources are needed to be able to switch focus and maneuver between different tasks and priorities.
If the company is in the phase of expansion to new markets or a new product release, innovation and progressive thinking might be more important than pure executive qualities.
The good news is that those expectations are rather universal in any case. They are somewhat unified. The bad news is that they depend on the maturity stage of the company. Simply put, you can be the right leader in one set of circumstances, and not a fit in the other.
Being a leader means balancing between different kinds of expectations
As we saw in the case of Google’s experiment, it’s not only the C-level or investors, but also subordinates and teams who are allowed to have expectations. And for a leader, it means always balancing between these axes.
Google is a good example, because a company of that size and level of maturity has many of the processes streamlined by now. They have accomplished a lot with their business model and it can serve as a case study. What’s more, their leadership model is based on the solid amount of variables and data that they’ve collected by now.
The growth of the team and the company comes through conflict of opinions and different perspectives of different leadership styles
Let’s say one leader on the team is trying to guide by their example (Expectation 6), and another leader by theirs, while those examples differ and maybe even clash. Seems like a confusing situation for everyone on board, doesn’t it?
It isn’t. We all have different social roles and we face different, often paradoxical, situations in life, which result in our constant need to validate our own position. At a certain point, everyone gets into dissonance or disagreement with someone around them. This is life. And it’s no different in business. The reality of one person always intersects with the reality of another person, or in our case another leader.
An ability to carefully work through such situations is an important skill of every leader. The more we are exposed to it, the more interesting the end result becomes.
Inexperienced leaders can fight for their own vision quite aggressively, trying to validate their perspective
“My way or the highway” is their idea of strong leadership. A leader can do it in their own way and conceal with gentle words, but once they come into a situation or discussion with a desire to promote only their own point of view without listening to other opinions, the game is halfway lost.
When two leaders pull in different directions, this will inevitably be reflected in the team’s well-being. Even if leaders within one team cannot find common ground, they still need to be united by common agreements about goals, some ethical principles, and other essential (for functioning in the environment) factors. If the clash of interests touches matters that are not vital to the team’s existence, it’s just a secondary issue. Both leaders need to understand where it should lead them and what result they want to achieve together, as a team.
A leader is not an object, but a subject of any business; only an active position can help you adapt to changes
Business needs in the company might change rapidly, either due to growth and reaching the next phase or due to a need for alterations. As a leader, you can find yourself in a situation where the changes have already happened but you missed the opportunity to adapt to them. External factors are usually an effect rather than a cause.
Typically, there’s a chain of events due to which the expectations from leaders can change, sometimes even turn by 180 degrees. Here, it is the leader's direct responsibility to untangle what’s behind those changing conditions, understand the correlation between events, and adapt accordingly: why is this needed? Why did the change happen? What is expected from me at this stage? How can I help?
Change management is not about getting a task to restructure or reorganize, and being done once it’s finished. Change management is about understanding these changes, understanding the reasons, and what needs to follow, including one’s own behavior.
In reality, leadership is built around people who are capable of creating the axis of their leadership style on their own
True leaders don’t need to be dictated “from above” about what needs to be done and how they need to change. They need to be able to adapt according to the axes that define their strategy or vision. A person—any person—is never static.
One of the most important skills for leaders is the ability to get a grip on transformations, including the ones happening internally. Here it’s not about getting around the changing circumstances by adapting to change (this can be viewed as an attempt to gain advantage). Rather, it’s about being a guide, for yourself and your team, through the challenging times.
Ultimately, it is really up to a leader to choose whether they are the ones staying ahead of the changes or letting changes get ahead of them. I hope that my insights and experiences with setting up and applying these expectations will help leaders improve their leadership style and grow their team, while responding to business needs proactively.
Just remember: you are always an active subject, not an object of any situation.