The Next Wave of Leadership! “What is Fad, Fashion or Fundamental?”
by Len Nanjad
With so many recent shifts in mindset, principles and rules that we sense are being demanded in this next wave of leadership and organization, it may be hard to tell what is a fad, fashion, or fundamental. What foundations do you really need to have and keep nurtured to ensure that you can try out new innovative approaches to see if they fit? Here are three things you can do:
1. Clarify Purpose:
What would the world look like if you solved the problem? What do you believe the world can become? It is the problem that you are in love with; not the solution nor how you will help solve it. This drives all else and creates the conditions that engage others who are in love with the same problem. It allows you to be adaptive to a “Just Cause” as Simon Sinek describes it, rather than a static solution that can and will be readily disrupted. This is the higher order organizational purpose. There are also team purposes and personal purposes.
Get your team to constantly think this way about their work and their collective purpose in service of the overall organizational purpose, strategy and culture. Does it fit with the purpose of the organization and drive forward the culture, the strategies and the plans of the organization? This can move you towards thinking about outcomes and key results (OKR’s) as higher impact ways to know if progress is being made, rather than more standard key performance indicators (KPI’s).
Make time to meditate and reflect on your inner self. This practice sets you on track to bring your whole self to all that you do. It is no longer enough to “switch into manager mode.” At a personal and work level, this helps define your own fit for purpose.
2. Grow a Garden:
The work is not to solve or direct; it is to garden: tend the soil, plant the seeds, make sure nutrients are provided, provide for sunshine. The role of leadership - very similar to tending a garden - is to move ever more towards sensing internally and externally, working with others on identifying patterns and interpreting the data, and creating the conditions for action learning to happen effectively. As a Gardener Leader you see the distinction between growth and development:
Growth is all about adding more to what we have. (i.e. we are adding people, space, equipment, sales, clients, territories).
Development is the ability to increase our capacity. (An ability to learn to adapt to shift our mindset.) When we are developing new capacity, we will be letting go of certain things in order to create a clearing for what is trying to emerge.
Remove barriers that help them move towards their natural strengths and desires to get stronger. And cheer and love them as they sprout and make progress.
Don’t yell at the garden to grow. This applies to both your people and your business results. They grow together.
3. Become a Host:
You are the host creating all the conditions for better interdependence. This is about building trust and building skill in group interactions. To build the ability to do this, you do have to establish clear expectations, outcomes, measures, and ways of working together.
You are not the decision-maker or the authoritative hero. Nor are you fully the “servant.” It is not enough to just spend time together in a physical or virtual room to solve a problem or come up with an action plan.
There are deliberate ways to improve working together to win together. For example, make time for groups to “check-in” and “check-out” of all interactions, explicitly. It will help improve their own internal switching speed and let them be their whole selves and be present much faster than waiting for everyone to sync up on their own.
It also means building skills to generate higher quality sharing, decision-making that distributes authority, and self-management among individuals and groups. You might facilitate the process of generative decision-making to include everyone in the process. This will create outcomes that really leverage the contributions of a community to a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
There are, of course, many other talents, skills, abilities, knowledge and experience you can develop to be an effective leader. Yet, in the doing of the fundamentals we suggest here, you will have a strong foundation to develop those other things along the way. And to apply them with the most powerful talent you will need - judgement.