Some Perspectives
Take Stock of Your Leadership Mindset
Mindsets play an important role in "what we believe" and "what we do", so they are this is a good place to start any leadership journey.
Thankfully, mindsets continue to evolve over-time through our learnings and experiences, so there is always opportunity to take stock or reflect on the best mindset we should bring to leadership work we do as a manager. So it is this context, we suggest you consider these 4 keys to your leadership agenda- in our experience, they are the basis of common standards of leadership practice that can drive positive cultural change and high performance in any workplace setting.
#1. Key Catalyst
We start from the premise that a manager's relational status is the thing that drives or determines their potential level of influence as a leader. Positional or technical authority cannot be discounted but plays a smaller role. Ultimately, the leadership impact you have is based on quality of relationships managers develop and sustain, and the best relationships are those based on mutual reciprocity that satisfy our desires for trust, tribe and need.
#2. Key to Growth
Put simply, this is your personal capacity to move away from transactional firefighting and towards higher level (more transformational) activities. This level of leadership goes hand-in hand with management routines, and means managers spend more of their time/effort facilitating, guiding, coaching, and linking their teams. That said, the quantity or time spent undertaking these activities is a necessary but not sufficient condition for greater influence
#3. Key to Effectiveness
Effectiveness is all about performance in each and every exchange or interaction. and "collaboration" is the single most important factor or key differentiator of leadership effectiveness. Collaboration in this context refers to a mode of engagement that optimises assertiveness and cooperation; think of it as a robust way of working together to deliver enhancements, solutions and innovations. Personality traits such as “agreeableness” and “extraversion” are important in forming relationships, but it is a manager’s actual behaviour and interactions that shape their relationships over time and high quality relationships can only be sustained through meaningful and transparent collaboration
#4. Key to Enterprise Performance
We complete the narrative with an explanation that the key to individual and group development is a well-defined leadership system. Like any other business process, leadership or people management can be standardised in ways and that in turns enables managers regardless of seniority or experience to build their confidence, and utilise their skills and procedures in a consistent way. so when it comes to your development agenda, think about how you would like to induct your cohort of managers to system that reflects these 4 keys and equips them to act in a consistent and cohesive way