Increase your leadership power to find and act on opportnities other miss

Increase your leadership power to find and act on opportunities others miss

Dr Dominik Heil

Warning! This article contains ideas, perspectives and viewpoints that attempt to challenge or dislodge established views on leaders and leadership. This includes philosophical perspectives that could unhinge long established assumptions which restrain leadership effectiveness. Some readers may find this challenging, others, we hope, empowering.

We’ve known much of this for some time. Yet one of the toughest challenges in organisations in today’s uncertain post Brexit world is cultivating a cadre of leaders with these qualities. Leaders who can be visionary and impactful, regardless of the uncertainty they face inside and outside their organisations. Leaders, who understand the nature of opportunities that arise in their daily management practice creating extraordinary organisations, where others don’t even spot that something truly world-altering is at play. Those who see the possible when others see impossible. The Accelerating Leadership Power programme from Praxis, begins with the most fundamental question: What is leadership? But are ‘attributes’ the sole reason these people became leaders? Are their choices and actions a consequence of their ‘qualities’? Sure, they are all talented, but is it what they’ve done, the ‘actions’, that we need to understand? Dr Dominik Heil wrestled with this dichotomy and the challenge of how to develop people as leaders. It led to him creating the innovative development process that underpins Praxis’ Accelerating Leadership Power programme. This approach begins with the most fundamental question: what is leadership?

Attributes, attitudes...what drives leadership power? Great leaders see their organisations differently to everyone else.They hold a richer insight into the internal and external environments in which the organisation operates. This insight helps them appreciate when and how to look further ahead and spot opportunities others miss. Such as Steve Jobs and his well-publicised grasp of the market and what people wanted from their devices. He used this to challenge and mould his people within the organisation to become more like him. He expanded this capability out from himself so that there was an organisation surrounding him as devoted as he was to realising opportunity driven by insight into user experience, not a slavish love of technology. This let him mould his people in the organisation so they could grasp and realise opportunity. They see the organisation they are part of differently. They have a stoicism that lets them evaluate what needs to be done, without becoming wedded in wasteful debates about why things aren’t perfect right now. This lets them be more productive, but in a different, non-clichéd way. Think about Lou Gerstner and the potential he saw within IBM and the hurdles he overcame to achieve them. They see people differently. They appreciate the complexity that arises from people, but also the power that sits within their people’s discretion if cultivated and directed astutely. They are also wise enough to know that people are the core of any organisation and are the real drivers of value. This lets them engage more with and inspire people than others do. Like Anne Mulcahy when she took over Xerox in 2001. Assuming command during a time of great uncertainty she invested time to personally meet with every one of her top 100 leaders. Engaging with them and outlining her vision of what needed to be done, made it their vision quickly. At a time when a Xerox executive was in high demand in the job market out of the 100 she met, only two jumped ship. Finally, they see themselves differently. They are humble when others show hubris. They are resolute when others are uncertain. They are brave and free when others are fearful and constrained. They know that they can only orchestrate: others are the ones who will make things happen. This makes them powerful as they get the best from people and don’t allow their ego to get in the way. As good an example of this you will find in Sarah Willingham, someone who can spot the potential in a business idea. Then underpin it with a robust business model, structure and organisation, then inspire those involved to rapidly make it a winning enterprise.

What is leadership? Developing the capability for leadership starts by helping those with leadership responsibilities build a rich understanding of what leadership actually is. Developing more effective leaders is enhanced when there is understanding of what leadership is and how it produces results. As obvious as that may sound, try typing ‘What is leadership (definition)?’ into Google and you’ll get 285,000,000 results. Clearly there are a lot of varying opinions on leadership. In addition, by the time they are in a senior managerial position, those in leadership roles in organisations will have been exposed to two or three models that represent what ‘good leadership’ is. They will have developed their own style of leadership, plus have one or two role models they aspire to emulate. So while it seems a rather simplistic starting point, for any leader wanting to enhance their capability it is a very good place to start. It may well be that leaders in a given context may require certain personality traits, ‘attributes’. But without a firm grip on the nature of the challenge of leadership, how can we know this for sure? This pragmatic approach helps avoid the leadership cliché that some are ‘born to it’. This is not how most of the popular approaches that occupy the leadership development space have come about. Instead of this ‘natural born leaders’ approach, sound understanding of leadership must start with properly considering and appreciating the context, process and systems, the ‘entities’ that are being led; namely organisations themselves.

First we help leaders understand the nature of the unique contextual challenges they face before we begin to look at what characteristics, skills and abilities are required to meet this challenge. We do this because this is where so many critical details are lost. We know from research that successful leaders do this more than less successful leaders. This habit of ‘scanning’ is a quality that many possess, but time and pressure can dull. So a predominant aim is helping provide a systematic approach that allows this to operate even when pressure is high and time is at a premium. Organisations have a profound effect on us and our productivity when we are within them. Only by facing up to how leadership will actually contribute to how well the organisation as a unique socially dynamic environment performs through the people within it, can a legitimate appreciation of the actual leadership challenge be made. What is an organisation? Once we know the source of an organisation’s and its people’s performance we can start to meaningfully ascertain what it means to influence the sources of performance. Consequently we also find out whether there are personality traits that are required in order to succeed in the endeavour. Like leadership this is often viewed as a ‘common sense’ subject, one that is ‘obvious’, but by the time someone is operating in a senior managerial role they will have acquired various notions on what an organisation is, does, how it behaves and so on. And as before this is interwoven with their personal experience. So having a systematic way that clarifies these often competing views is perhaps where the real ‘common sense’ sits? Disciplines such as psychology, complexity theory, systems thinking, neurobiology and even micro economics have provided the leadership development space with solutions that have worked within the subject matters of each discipline. However these are often applied without thought and regardless of whether the subject matter is in any way similar to organisations and the people who work in them. Therefore we propose that a well-grounded approach to leadership development must start with understanding how it is that organisations and the people working within them are able to perform as they do, in various circumstances and then to explore how this ability of organisations and individuals within them can be further enabled and enhanced by those tasked to lead.

Organisations have more influence on us than we may like to admit. We are social creatures by nature; therefore an organisation has a profound effect on us. Being in an organisation changes us. It can alter our mood, dull or open up our thinking. It can alter our mannerisms, influence how we behave. It can shape how we relate to each other and, crucially it can also fundamentally influence the outlook we have on our future. Organisations are an altogether more powerful entity than we often realise. The question about the very nature of an organisation is a philosophical question and within philosophy it falls into the domain of metaphysics and ontology. One might argue that organisational management is very practical and should not concern itself with philosophy much. But in fact taking a philosophical perspective is highly relevant. Challenging at first, once mastered it has powerful and direct implication for increasing effectiveness of everyday leadership practice. The nature of people With a philosophical perspective comes an awareness of what can and can’t be influenced, allowing strength to emerge from a having a more grounded stoical perspective. This awareness of what you can and can’t alter helps provide the basis for developing sustainable resilience and focus. As well as allowing insights into where your strengths, leverage and fields of influence are located. How does a leader actually engage with the organisation? If we look into the field of ontology we can find, beyond physical objects, plants, animals and human beings a fourth type of entity which resonates with how organisations, as described above, have the effect of changing our mood, thinking and outlook. These entities are called ‘works’. The critical characteristic of ‘works’ is that they set up a ‘world’. ‘World’ is used here in the same sense as when one talks about the ‘corporate world’, the ‘world of academia’, two people ‘being worlds apart’ or ‘two worlds coming together’. As an approximation we might also refer to world as a culture, a context, a paradigm, a taken for granted common understanding or simply ‘the way things are around here’. When we engage with them we are transported into unique reality. When we are in an organisation we are always in its ‘world’ and consequently this ‘world’ always has a profound effect on us. Why? Humans have evolved to be shaped by as well as shaping the ‘world’ which they inhabit. So by understanding the reality of our ‘world’ we establish a core part of having influence and power within it. That insight brings greater confidence and impact. The challenge of leadership development therefore can only be met within a highly thoughtful, and at the

same time rigorously applied, examination of how we as human beings always think and act based on our implicit (and almost entirely taken for granted) understanding of ‘how things are around here’. This leads to three key logical and fundamental steps, questions, which need to be answered systematically and using the right tools, techniques and approaches, before any approach to leadership and how they ought to operate can be constructed: • What in the first instance, actually is, an organisation? • What is a person? • What is the relationship between people within a given organisation that so profoundly influences each other’s performance? Knowing these things allows the leader to calculate where to focus and prioritise. This provides the ‘vision’. Fuelled by robust insight into the true nature of the challenges being faced and less reliant on ‘old thinking’, gut instinct or much worse, stale ideas not appropriate for new problems. Becoming a visionary leader Only once we systematically and carefully recalibrate this understanding can we adapt ourselves to the organisational reality we may have hitherto overlooked. Then can begin the truly powerful step of opening up and realising new avenues for performance and creativity. So by extending what ‘everyone around here’ takes for granted, leadership more purposefully begins to meet its challenge. Then it deserves the title of ‘Visionary’ – not just mere feel-good talk, but bringing forth something more real and powerful than the circumstances we are immediately confronted with. That’s how we meet the challenges facing us today. Understanding this reality and in doing so mastering it. That is powerful leadership. So what is it, attributes, attitudes……or? Being sincere it’s a bit of a false dichotomy: visionary leaders see their organisations differently to everyone else, but the attributes or attitudes can only be beneficial if they are encased within the appropriate actions. In other words a greater grasp of yourself, people and the organisation itself, is the source for growing the power you possess as a leader.

For more information, please contact: Sue Bosher T: +44 (0)1234 754497 E: susan.bosher@cranfield.ac.uk www.cranfield.ac.uk/som/alp