In real terms, leadership today is about creating the circumstances where people can express the best they have to offer, in service of the purpose of the organisation. Leaders who understand how to empower people to go for greatness, and create the conditions for us to flourish are always in demand.
If you ask most people what good leadership is, they typically will reflect on leaders who have been effective for them in the past, and be able to say with confidence what good leaders do - that is, effective at engaging and enrolling people to achieve great results.
If you get these same people to reflect on how well they do these things themselves, you start to realise it is not just a matter of knowing what works. Turning knowledge into effective action is a much greater challenge.
Measuring effectiveness
Most people are comforted that if they know something, they can do it. We therefore tend to have some illusions about our effectiveness. The only real test is to look at our results. What is the evidence of our effectiveness?
Try this quick assessment of your leadership effectiveness:
- Is the vision being realised?
- Are you executing the strategy?
- Is the business performing financially, achieving market share and with strong customer relations?
- How is your reputation with all your stakeholders?
- How healthy is your culture?
- How do your score on engagement, job satisfaction and retention?
- How healthy is the workforce psychological contract with the organisation, including the board?
Organisations are involved in a creative activity
Organisations exist to create some outcome that is valued by our society. If it is a commercial organisation, people will pay money for what is created. If it is a community service, money will be invested in it, reflecting the value placed upon the service. Leaders are therefore realising a collective creative activity.
The creative process involves:
- Vision - Conceiving of what you want to create
- Strategy - Determining how to create it
- Skills and resources - Ensuring you have the capability to create it
- Relationship - The will and persistence required to go through the process
- Execution - Bringing it into being
This includes the painful parts as well as the inspiring ones. Not only does it need to be clear in your mind, but also in the minds of everyone who has a role in creating the results. The more people involved, the bigger the challenge. In organisations, leading can become quite a complex activity and leaders need to understand and be able to influence all the forces at play, both directly and through others.
Artist/leaders
Looking into the life of creative artists can give you a window into the key ingredients in human creativity. Leaders need to understand this well if they want to be optimally effective in leading this collective creation.
Let's assume the artist/leader has no shortage of ideas of what they want to create. The artist must know and understand all the tools and techniques of their craft. In the case of business, this is the activity that is the purpose of the organisation, and how to engage and enroll people to do this. Simply put; the task and the relationships
If the artist/leader -
- Creates focus on the desired outcome,
- Calibrates progress against that desired outcome,
- Embraces the challenges and makes adjustments using their skill and judgment, and
- Learns new approaches,
- then progress will be achieved.
However, if the artist/leader becomes focused on the problems/difficulties and/or refuses to face facts and explore alternatives, the relationship with the creative process changes. It becomes about frustration and removing the undesired obstacles; or worse, delusional.
Energy is directed in such a way as to cause hardship. This is where struggle sets in. Artists who are overcome by this are limited and often don't produce impressive results.
Leadership effectiveness is about making life easier to create the desired result, to remain in the creative orientation, not the reactive. It requires you to work constructively with the forces at play.
Reactive tendencies arise whenever we feel the need to comply, protect or control. It is based on deep assumptions that work very subtly to inhibit our creative ability. Mostly we have such strong rationalisations for the value of our actions, we are not aware of the reactive tendencies that make our lives more difficult than they need to be.
Self-awareness and courage
If leaders are to leverage effectiveness, they need to be insightful about their own reactive tendencies and how they inhibit their leadership. Awareness allows us to make choices about our behaviour rather than being blind to their very real effect. Self-awareness is a powerful tool in enabling us to be more effective.
If you examine where resistance or opposition exists within organisations you will find reactivity rather than creativity. People often lack the skills and appetite to face reality and deal with it constructively. It confronts defenses that make us feel safe. We prefer to keep them intact, rather than open Pandora's box and face the challenge they represent.
The ability of the human mind to create comforting illusions is strong. Developing the skills and disciplines for discerning reality from illusions requires significant courage and commitment.
Creative and reactive competencies
There have been themes in the leadership development field that highlight various aspects of leadership effectiveness. Much has been made of emotional intelligence and its importance in the relational aspects of leadership. Others have focused on execution being critical to achieving results, by getting things done. Systems thinking has become key to dealing with complexity, which is increasing, with the strong trends of convergence.
In addition, as we confront increasingly significant ethical dilemmas, character and personal mastery command strong attention. It is not any one of these things but a dance between them all where they are integrated into a whole concept of leadership effectiveness.
The Leadership Circle ProfileTM was developed by Bob Anderson by examining the full range of leadership competencies that are correlated with business performance, making the link between outcomes and competencies that deliver those outcomes.
He identified, through research, the key creative leadership competencies in the 5 categories of relating, self awareness, authenticity, system awareness and achieving. The 3 reactive leadership competencies categories identified are complying, protecting and controlling.
The reactive competencies have strengths contained within them, although they have inherent limitations as well. When the limitations are understood and creative competencies combined with them, they become levers for effectiveness.
Balance
The major challenges of both work/life balance on the one hand and sustainable productivity on the other. There are limits regarding how hard people can work and function effectively. The intensifying of the work day and demands for improved productivity need to be handled insightfully or people will suffer the effects of exhaustion.
Organisations are never short on great ideas that could be implemented. What they are short on, is either the resources and skills, or the realistic understanding of what it takes to get the results - and the willingness to face the reality of that and respond accordingly.