Do you need to get back in the everyday leadership saddle?
In January I signed up for a workshop – sort of a pep talk about how to stay focused on what is really important in life and business. Unfortunately it turned out to be overbooked.
But then the lecturer wrote to me: Why don’t you go for the February workshop instead? And he continued. In January everybody still remember their new year’s resolutions. In February we start to drop off a bit. And that is the time we really need to hold on to whatever it was we decided we wanted to do differently this year instead to giving in to resignation and the slight embarrassment that this is happening.
Is he right?
Is this also happening to you?
If you read this blog, I assume you are dedicated to improving your everyday leadership, right?
Well, the good news are, that it is never too late and it only requires very little effort to get back in the saddle, when it comes to demonstrating everyday leadership.
All it takes is some conscious attention to one or more of the seven areas, which define your everyday leadership: strategy deployment, organisation development, knowledge management, team building, career management, decision processes, and performance.
For instance, you could choose the next staff meeting to initiate a review of your units knowledge sharing and management. Maybe you could spend the month of March on the review and then together decide if any changes are needed.
Maybe, after you have launched the review, you will take the approach of limiting yourself to coaching your staff’s exploration of the topic.
Or maybe you prefer to think the review process through beforehand and lay out the steps and the structure you want to follow.
Or maybe you find it more appropriate to pick another topic?
The choice of role and style is entirely yours. ? As long as you pick one of the seven above mentioned themes (which are identical with the seven Direct Leadership roles, you are right on track to showing your staff that you are in fact a leader who takes the job of leading seriously.
Try it – and tell me how it goes.
Is (everyday) direct leadership among your new year’s resolutions?
If not, what reason do you give yourself?
Are you already a bright, shining star on the leadership firmament, so you do not have to worry?
Or are you in a senior, maybe executive position and do not consider everyday, direct leadership YOUR business? Do you focus on the overall goals? the strategy? the business results?
Or do you rely exclusively on the relationship and trust between you and your staff?
Well, here is news for you.
Whether you are the direct leader of only a handful of people or the executive of thousands, the question of how the day-to-day leadership of your organization’s employees is carried out is indeed both your responsibility and the most important key to implementing strategy and achieving business results.
I wrote about leadership and traffic signals in my last blog post.
Maybe it is because I live in a city. A city where a lot of change is going on. Renewal of old sewage systems, efforts to limit traffic in the central parts of town and the building of a new metro line. And as if this was not enough, one of the main subways stations here needs such a fundamental makeover that all car traffic past it is prohibited for two years.
To us, the citizens of Copenhagen, this means we need to change our behavior, find new routes to get from A to B, accept that the time to cover a certain distance has doubled, live with the noise and view of numerous construction sites. Like what happens, when an organization goes through change.
Imagine, if – during these changes – there was no uniformity to the signs, and you had to rely on trust alone …
If nobody understood the light signals or the gestures of the police officers assigned to lead, when and where there is doubt about the direction or about who must give way to the other party….
If traffic lights weren’t red, yellow, green, but some were flashing read or blue and could be mistaken for police cars or alarm signals…
If one police officer guides us by hand gestures, but another requires of us to notice the subtle movements of his eyebrows…
How does this relate to everyday, direct leadership?
As an individual team leader implementing change, you are like a police officer in a road intersection. While trust is crucial, it is equally important to understand the current context, interpret the overall goals, strategies and values, understand how people’s minds and hearts work.
AND… with all that in mind … you must discern when and how to intervene with guidance, support or remind someone to observe the rules, i.e. provide the leadership deliverables.
If you are an executive, you too must inspire trust. You must transform your analysis of the context into overall goals, strategies, and values. You too must communicate with an understanding of people’s minds and hearts
AND… you must ensure a leadership infrastructure that ensures that leadership at all “intersections” between leaders and staff is carried out according to a common understanding of the leadership deliverables. In this way you create conditions that facilitate strategy deployment and smooth change processes. Without it, you must foresee slow “traffic” and plenty of bottlenecks.
Which of the above applies to YOU in 2012?
PS! To learn more about my leadership deliverables model, drop write a comment below or send an e-mail to karin@zastrow.dk and make an appointment to talk or tell me to send you a copy of my book “Direct Leadership”.
Leaders and Traffic Signals
Imagine driving through a city in the rush hour.
See how you and other people speed up, slow down, look for a sign to see if it is ok to make a left turn here, come to a halt at a traffic light. And then resume pace.
Now imagine that there are no signposts or traffic lights.
Instead, at every road-cross there is a police officer, who has defined his own rules and signs for how to control the flow of cars, cyclists, pedestrians and other wayfarers.
At times people’s eyes go blank when I talk about the need for a leadership infrastructure that aligns an organisation’s leadership deliverables.
The metaphor of traffic signs vs. individualistic policemen, however, rarely leaves anyone unaffected. Either in words or by body language people generally confirm that they can all imagine what that would look like and how frustrating it would feel.
Yet, thousands and thousands of organisations let the execution of their strategies ”travel” through an organisation whose leaders have largely defined their own leadership deliverables.
”But, we have both values and a set of leadership competencies!” some will argue.
I strongly advocate that an organisation has clear values and requires that leaders subscribe to them. Just as I support that leaders possess a set of generally acknowledged leadership skills (typically: general communication/people skills, assertiveness, results driven).
However, unless the competencies embed the sort of operational leadership deliverables that are at the core of the Direct Leadership model, neither values nor competencies will ensure consistent practise.
Every single policeman in the example may subscribe wholeheartedly to the values of the police force. Just as he may have a the skills of a good police officer and be determined to do a good job.
However, if he does not deliver in accordance with some sort of common standard language, then a) the wayfarers at his road cross will struggle to understand what he wants them to do and traffic will move in a slow and staccato way and b) his contribution to the big picture will at best be poor or even counterproductive.
Establishing leadership infrastructure is to make sure that there is a general understanding across the board of “what the traffic signs mean” when leaders do and deliver.
Is patience a leadership virtue?
My friend and business partner, Monica Diaz (owner of Quidam Global in Mexico) raised the question this week on LinkedIn.
Being a bit of a word fetishist, this question is for me a delight. A temptation to indulge in the etymology of this human characteristic that we all know and often apply – generally assuming that we all agree that it is a virtue.
At the same time, I truly enjoy working with people whom some would consider impatient. Why? Because I appreciate decisive go-getters. People who make up their minds and act.
With this in mind I was further intrigued by some of the comments that immediately confirmed the general perception: “YES, patience is definitely a virtue and leaders should therefore display more of it.”
So my mind started going: Wait a minute… Is patience purely a virtue? Is it always a virtue? Is it sometimes not a virtue? Can impatience be a virtue?
When taking a closer look at both terms: patient and impatient, my suspicion was confirmed. Humanity is not in complete accord that one is purely good and the other is only bad.
On the one hand, the etymology of the words patience and patient speak about the ability to endure or suffer, damage, hurt, injure without complaint.
On the other hand, one of the most common families of flowers found everywhere on the planet bears the Latin name of “impatiens”, which refers both to how quickly the plant grows, how abundantly it blossoms – and to the way its seeds fruits burst in a small explosion, which sends seeds out in all directions.Impatiens Walleriana (Source: Google).
Let me now connect this back to leadership – in particular to everyday leadership and the Direct Leadership model, which together constitute the hub of this blog.
Patience, engraving by Hans Sebald Beham, 1540 (Source: Wikipedia)
Question: Is patience then a virtue in relation to everyday leadership?
Answer : IT ALL DEPENDS!
It all depends on how you assess the situation and choose to act upon it.
Does the situation that has caught your attention relate to the short term or the long term?
Are you looking at something that you want to cultivate over a period? For instance by means of the Coach style?
May impatience at times be considered equally virtuous?
Absolutely – some issues require that you act without delay.
At times you are looking at a critical situation, which calls for an urgent Initiator style intervention. At other times you have a harmful or counterproductive situation on your hands, which must urgently be brought to an end with a Referee style intervention.
In the latter situations impatience is infinitely more virtuous than its generally celebrated counterpart. As a leader, you should not measure your success by your ability to ”bear or endure suffering without complaint”.
Instead, you must act in ways which prevent, reduce or mend suffering in favour of creating productive teamwork, goal achievement, decisions, career development, etc.
And for this to happen, patience and impatience should be considered as two different gears to be applied according to the situation and your intention.
Impatiens Walleriana (Source: Google) – enjoy its beauty!
Related articles
- Patience, grasshopper. (raycha11.wordpress.com)
Everyday leadership in Scandinavia and Asia?
Some people ask. Others simply question that a leadership model developed in Scandinavia can be applicable as far away from ”home” as in China or for that matter further away than Northern Europe.
When it comes to everyday leadership, however, two different trends seem to move all the worlds’ workplaces in the same direction when it comes to leader-employee interaction:
a) an ever-increasing proportion of the workforce is well-educated
b) both B2B and consumer business are increasingly client driven, which means that more and more employees must be empowered to use some amount of discretion when providing a product or service to a client.
Consequently, whatever the old day-to-day leadership model was, in a particular field or region of the world, it is now obsolete.
Today’s modern workplace needs a modern approach to everyday leadership. In the same way that employees must use their discretion from case to case, leaders must do so and understand that leadership has become truly situational.
No leader can afford to only know one leadership style and apply it in all situations. As a minimum he or she must know and distinguish between the four styles of Direct Leadership: The Catcher style for noticing the leadership opportunities, and the Initiator, Coach or Referee styles for taking proper and discretionary action.
Finally, to catch the leadership opportunities as they emerge, it is necessary that the themes, which must be covered in leader-employee interaction are on every leader’s radar. This too is described in the Direct Leadership model.
Did you sign in for the Direct Leadership App’ yet?
If not, go to www.directleadership.eu and do so. Since we are still operating a beta-version everything is still free. Enjoy! Works for I-Phones, Smartphones, I-Pads and all other tablet-pc’s.
Leadership and mushroom hunting
Where I live the mushroom picking season has arrived. All the various edible mushrooms seem to shoot out of the ground when the humidity and temperature is right, grow ready to be picked in just a few days and then just as quickly decay and go to waste.
The other day after a successful mushroom hunt the resemblance between mushroom hunting and everyday leadership struck me.
Initially, you need to have an idea of the main species you are looking for (and which ones you want to avoid). And then the main thing is to BE THERE and get your eyes properly focused to see them, when they have emerged and are just ready to be picked.
Everyday Direct Leadership is no different. You have to know what you are looking for – i.e. the leadership roles/your main areas of responsibility in relation to your staff. And then you need to make your way to where the leadership opportunities come ”out of the ground”.
In both cases, you will not necessarily pick every emerging specimen. Some may be too small, others may be too old. You want the ones that are just right.
And once you have harvested, you need to quickly decide what kind of action to take.
When talking about mushrooms you must decide between drying for later usage and preparing at once.
When you have harvested or caught a leadership opportunity – a situation in which you want to make a leadership intervention – the choice is between the initiator-, coach- or referee approach. Do you want to install a change or a remedy of your own making, develop your staff’s own competencies or course correct by giving your assessment of the case before you?
Are you aware of what you want to catch? If so, I suggest you make time this week to put yourself in a place to notice the mushrooms.
A kick-ass leadership opportunity
Where I live in Scandinavia, this is one of the two times each year, when it feels like we are all making a fresh start. The other occasion is New Year’s. Right now, the summer season is coming to an end. Not only did the children start school this morning. We, their parents and colleagues of their parents are resigning ourselves to putting the sunny days out of our minds and getting our heads wrapped more intensely around whatever work it is that we do for a living.
If you are a leader somewhere in the world, and the conditions are similar to the above, it is a perfect time to make some changes to your interaction with your staff. In fact, what better time can you conceive of?
You are not the only person who has had time to clear your head by a break from the daily routines. So has your staff.
In the past, I was inclined to think that this feeling of ”making a fresh start” was just that, i.e. a feeling. A kind of transient illusion, but not a reality.
However, this summer a friend inspired me to take a look at Carl Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, and from doing so I realised that by taking a break from the hamster wheel, we actually create conditions for better, more centred listening, thinking and sensing. We move in the direction of what he calls “presencing”. Presencing means to put ourselves as individuals or collectively as groups in a state of mind from where we are capable of relating to the now and to the emerging future instead of taking our action cues from the past.
I call that a kick-ass leadership opportunity, which calls for immediate action!
• Call a staff meeting as early as this week.
• Don’t worry if a few people can’t be there as long as the large majority is there.
• Start by welcoming everybody.
• Go round the table and let everyone say very briefly how their summer has been. (Be sensitive to the fact that lots of things may have happened, so if someone has experienced some hardship, ask if this is something he or she wants to say more about. If so, give it some space). Maybe you also want to thank them all or certain individuals for holding the fort while resources were scarce.
• Then tell them that the reason for this meeting is to look ahead from now and until New Year’s (or Thanksgiving, or next summer – you decide) with fresh eyes.
• Ask for people’s thoughts on where you as a company/division/department/team are heading and what you may want to do, create or change in order to get there. (If the group is large, you may want to start the discussion in small groups and then hear from each group).
• Take notes or have someone do so.
• See what happens.
• Gently challenge them if they suggest habitual measures, make sure that the focus stays on what needs to be done in relation to the emerging future.
• Wrap up the meeting with the relevant decisions.
o Anything, the parties involved should simply go ahead and implement?
o Something that needs to be discussed or further analysed?
o Something you yourself want to look more into?
• Close the meeting with agreeing one the decisions and when to follow-up.
• Say thank you for their enthusiasm/attention/openness?
And now – especially if you are a Direct Leadership student – count your blessings! Look at your notes, compare them to the seven roles, and notice how you have actively put yourself in a position to catch a collection of leadership opportunities. At the same time as you have started to teach your organisation that tomorrow’s solutions are not found by blindly “extending the past”.
Everyday leadership – virtually!
Yesterday I was asked what I consider the key elements of virtual or distance leadership.
The three words that come to my mind, now that I take a moment to think about it, are: clarity, consistency and trust. Actually the very same I would use about non-virtual leadership. Why? Because the core challenges involved in leading a team whose members are geographically scattered is no different from leading people in your proximity. The difference is that the communication channel you have at your disposal with people, who are not in your proximity is quite narrow. Consequently the crucial clarity, consistency and trust must be created in an environment where nothing comes for free.
When leading in proximity, your staff will see you and hear you in all kinds of interactions: both your formal interactions with staff and the informal ones; how you interact with other leaders; with clients and superiors; how you sound when answering the phone and it’s your 6-year old who tells you that about what happened at school today, etc. All of this comes for free, simply by virtue of working in proximity with you and having the ability to interact with you outside the formal settings. And it all contributes to your staff’s image of you as someone who speaks clearly, cares about and trusts in people, walks your talk – or doesn’t. All of these impressions eventually translate into a certain amount of mutual trust and alignment between you and the people geographically close to you.
When you work with virtual staff, this important ‘intangible’ of leadership is unlikely to build up unless you make a conscious and consistent effort to be clear, consistent and develop a positive and trusting relationship with the virtual staff.
It goes without saying that visions, values and goals need to be clear. From the companywide overriding visions and values and all the way down to this periods targets for each individual.
Likewise, you must use whatever technology you can get your hands on, which will expand the bandwidth of your communication. Forget about telephone conferences – get webcams installed so that you can have videoconferences. Make it a staff member’s explicit responsibility to stay on track of the technological improvements that happen every week – and make sure he or she keeps you posted, when there is a chance to upgrade the technology you use to stay in touch with each other. This is not only a matter of having the newest technology, it is also a clear signal to your virtual staff that you consider your relationship with them so important, that you want the best possible communication channels.
However besides these two, you create clarity, consistency and trust in three ways:
First, you should name your own leadership deliverables:
a) that your job as a leader is to deploy strategy, develop the organization, ensure the knowledge flow and the team’s wellbeing, nurture their individual career and competency development, facilitate decisions and ensure short term productivity.
b) that you will be a radar for positive and negative vibes in each of these areas in order to catch those situations when you must intervene as a leader
c) that you may choose to intervene as either the initiator, the coach or the referee
Secondly, you should use the leadership deliverables as your framework for discussions with individuals and the team as a whole. This will show the consistency, which is crucial when the bandwidth is narrow, and moreover it will give you the additional benefit that your staff will be inclined to monitor themselves in the same areas. In this way, they will experience your ‘presence’ even if you are geographically distant.
Thirdly, you should take the lead in creating an open dialogue. Be straight about your own thoughts and feelings in relation to work (what you like/dislike). Be curious and explorative, rather than judgmental and defensive. Ask for the same from your staff and intervene if you experience unconstructive behaviours.
