Leadership is something that is constantly thrown around , especially in the workshop space, as an ever evolving content pool on the subject continues to erupt.
Recently I was invited to deliver a key note to a motivated group of Monash University students in Melbourne, via my office here on the Gold Coast and our good old friend Zoom. The topic requested was to give the students an introduction to some of the basic fundamentals of leadership. In trying to come up with something useful yet more ‘my style’ and what leadership (at the basics) means to me, and how I’ve seen it work well in teams I’ve worked with.
So I came up with the topic of Leading Through. Based on reviewing recent work I’ve done with teams on culture and leadership rebuilds.
Rather than thinking lineal on how we lead people , ie from front or behind or now I recently heard leading from the side ?? I unpacked how we can Lead Through using 3 key pillars to achieve 3 core baselines for leaders to create amazing teams and people.
The 3 Pillars for Leading Through:
1. Communication
2. Service
3. Process
With 3 fundamental objectives for a Leader to aspire for his/her team. My (probably not so unique) 3 E’s of Leadership:
1. Empowerment – team members are trained, psychologically equipped and endorsed to make decisions and create results
2. Engagement – team members are emotionally connected to creating the outcome and are apart of the overall purpose.
3. Enablement – Team members have the resources and support they need to succeed.
Now all of this relies on a baseline of service leadership; however the macro is to effectively build teams and highly Empowered, Engaged and Enabled people so that you as the leader can simply get out of the way and let them go and be awesome.
The 3 pillars allow us to do this. As they all build and lead towards trust.
1. Leading Through Communication: We spend years understanding communication, from tactical to psychological however for this purpose we have 2 fundamentals. Context and Feedback.
Context built around a shared set of core values or “opus memorandum” and a shared purpose; essentially leading to “why we do things and how we do things”. If everyone shares the context we’re halfway to the 3 E’s already.
Feedback is the 2nd part. And no, I don’t mean sit down de-breifs or “appraisals” , think macro again.. here I mean a constant flow both ways of information on all topics. An open slate approach to feedback and information flow so our highly Empowered, Engaged, Enabled humans with great context have the information they need to be amazing and take even more amazing action.
With context and feedback; we build a communication model that allows humans and teams to do what they do best… achieve.
2. Leading Through Service was next: And this is a fundamental to leadership in 2021 for me. It’s our job now as leaders to be of service to our team. It used to be that we’d find the best “do’er” and promote them to leadership. Whoever got the best results got the captain’s badge. But the skillset to be a do’er is not the same skill set to lead people… it’s an entirely different personality. Leaders of Service now must engage their bandwidth on one thing. What does my team need from me to be amazing? A service leader is not focusing on the result, they are no longer ‘on the floor’ being the best do’er. A service leader is there to work for their team , to provide inspiration, coaching, mentoring, training, development and connection to build context, champion feedback and yep you guessed it… focus on ensuring their team are Empowered, Engaged and Enabled to be great. Focus on your team, let your team take care of the business and the business will take care of itself. Simple …
3. Lastley we have Leading Through Process: For me , we are creatures of habit, we need to build process into our model so we can replicate what works and improve what doesn’t. How does your team plan, set goals, debate objectives , measure success and continually learn from each outcome; good or bad? There is great benefit in engaging your team to reflect, review and report together on outcomes, to openly discuss their wins and losses and collectively set objectives for the next task. Our job as leaders is to provide the space, openness and structure to build that conversation around and then to coach, guide and mentor teams to map the rest out themselves. A team with great context and feedback will build epic pathways to success and here is where innovation really begins to flourish.
With these 3 pillars we can build an environment that allows us to Lead Through our people directly into the 3 E’s and then simply and quite frankly get out of the way. Provided the talent is there, and you have hired and trained correctly; which is the precursor to all of this…talent density (Thanks Reed Hastings of Netflix for that one), then Leading Through gives us a framework for the future of creating amazing teams.