Leadership And Creating The Space

1. Create space to bring the most talent into the room - When facing key strategic challenges, you must bring the most talented people together, be it mission-critical employees, consumers, competitors, future employees or thought leaders.
   
   
   • Primary skill: Constantly scan the crowd, knowing who is out there and what unique value they will bring.
     
     
   • Potential obstacle: The tendency to only invite those who are liked, or simply available.
     
     
2. Create the space to provide an informed opinion - Create space for those people to provide you an informed opinion. Provide your people with the most cutting-edge trends and best practices to ensure they keep a healthy air of dissatisfaction. Require them to search for new perspectives before working on key challenges.
   
   
   • Primary skill: Amplifying curiosity.
     
     
   • Potential obstacle: Censoring perspectives by controlling available information.
     
     
3. Create the space to fiercly debate issues - Debate allows you to see issues clearly, uncover past compromises, understand dynamic tensions, overcome interpersonal obstacles, and push your thinking forward. You must encourage space for debate by asking difficult questions, resisting personalising issues, encouraging disagreement, and showing vulnerability.
   
   
   • Primary skill: Creating insightful conversations.
     
     
   • Potential obstacle: Punishing dissenters and seeking to live in a world of "violent agreement".
     
     
4. Create the space to practise breakthrough thinking - Innovation in processes, approaches and operating philosophies is vital, positioning your firm for disruption, technological advance or industry shift. To create the space for such breakthroughs, you must uncover dynamic tensions, encourage new approaches and reward risk.
   
   
   • Primary skill: Enabling daydreaming.
     
     
   • Potential obstacle: Banging your judge's gavel to evaluate an idea as soon as it is voiced.
     
     
5. Create space to discover what matters most - By letting people use some time to create initiatives and projects that drive real difference, while aligning with the organisation's goals, you create a space where their passions can meld with organisational hopes, resources and strategies. They can prototype ideas, test potentially revolutionising initiatives, and mine the lessons from these experiments.
   
   
   • Primary skill: Encouraging critical reflection, so the key lessons are pulled out of each initiative and a return obtained.
     
     
   • Potential obstacle: Pulling the puppeteers strings, limiting your return on talent by using them to implement only a few big ideas.

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