Articles #Leadership

Leadership development activities must change the context within which leading takes place as teachable moments that break old mindsets and shape individual leaders.

Effective organizations have a different way of looking at how people work together. They desire to build community; a sense that all are part of a team with a compelling shared purpose to accomplish. They resist the tendency to “just get the job done” and are concerned more with the relationships with the people doing the job.

Side projects, interesting new ideas, and the crisis of the day can divert resources from key activities. In isolation, pursuing these small ideas might make sense, but when put in the broader context of the entire organization’s transformation plan, leaders get to see exactly how non-essential these distractions are.

Exceptional communications must break traditional models that hoard information, feeds the status quo while protecting the command and control structure so that only the upper levels of management know what is happening in the business. Leaders in effective organizations break through the functional aspects and collectively develop a system-wide view of the transformation. This provides full alignment and integration across and up/down the organization for a cohesive leadership approach.

Leaders MUST grasp the fact that before people will accept change, they must first become aware and fully understand what is to be accomplished and then be convinced of the need for it. They must be given the facts about the situation facing the organization, the level of improvements needed to become competitive again and the new organizational standards expected. Communications must have substance and meaningful information; it cannot be a simple playbook handed out for all to use.

As a leader, you must foster an open mindset coupled with an independent quest for knowledge.

Critical thinking is a purposeful and organized mental process that is used to understand the whole organizational system or a specific process as a whole; meaning the full upstream, stream, downstream as well as feeder sources.

The critical thinking process is what's going to differentiate leaders and the solutions developed versus rushing off without any thought at all.

Leaders MUST shape the learning of others through experiences that reinforce desired behaviors and actions to prevent wasted effort. Leaders help members identify and avoid prior pitfalls while engaging some of the previously involved members to help challenge the thinking.

Leadership development depends not just on the kinds of experience one has but also on how one uses the experiences to foster the development of new beliefs and behaviors.

Effective leaders are diligent and deliberate about creating an environment that is conducive to learning. Learning aspects of informal and formal leadership in support of leadership culture.

Leaders MUST understand their own accountabilities as the leader. Both what you're accountable for, and who you're accountable to. In terms of what you're accountable for, obviously, your own work, but also your team's work. This you have to hold them accountable for delivering those results.