Leadership
development often focuses on doing — the mastering and use of certain desirable skills and behaviors that concretely show
someone to be leading. Competency-based models can provide lists of such
skills, as well as attributes of their practice. But where leadership
effectiveness really starts is with thinking — adopting a mental model
that makes it possible to acquire those skills and demonstrate those behaviors
in the first place. Mastering leadership thinking can be challenging, but it is
absolutely essential. I may adopt the exact stance and handgrip of Jordan Spieth, but I’m unlikely to win
the Masters — while there may be a (wide) gap in our athletic abilities, there
is an even larger one in our mental capacity for the game of golf.
Leadership
thinking can be learned but is difficult to teach. It is a matter of asking
questions and presenting challenges that help someone discover the mental model
that enables their “best leader” to emerge. It requires not just competency,
but demonstrated proficiency. And proficiency only comes with practice,
feedback, and analysis. Journaling and other reflective exercises are good for processing and absorbing both
successes and failures. As Peter Drucker said, “Follow effective
action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more
effective action.”
Leadership
thinking requires not just competency, but demonstrated proficiency.
In
my experience, there are three big mental shifts that aspiring leaders must
make in order to develop thinking capacity and capability:
Management systems and processes tend to be
linear. They assume that similar inputs will result in similar outputs. In many
situations, this holds true. Leadership, however, requires a more nuanced view
of the world because it involves people: what motivates them, what their
interests are, and how engaged they become. Mechanical systems may be linear
but as soon as the human element becomes involved, the system becomes both
complex and adaptive. It is dynamic — similar inputs may bring about wildly
divergent outputs.
As
a leader, you come to understand that relationships between the system
components are paramount, rather than the components themselves. Discerning
these dynamics is essential to achieving your desired outcome, which means you
think about connectivity, and the extent and robustness of those connections.
You accept that these relationships contain some performance factors you
control and some you don’t — you are part of the system, but likely not its
gravitational center — and that effective influence can amplify your impact on
those beyond your direct purview.
When
things go well or when you hit a bump along your leadership road, ask yourself
which direct and indirect relationships were at play. Where did your attention
to positive connectivity pay dividends and where might you have done better?
There is always temptation
to set static goals — annual growth rate, net profit, or customer acquisition
costs, for example — but once you accept that you are operating in a dynamic
and adaptive environment, you begin to realize such goals have limitations. As
a leader, you must continually recalibrate to ensure that you have established
the right goals and that they not only include financial measures but also
purpose (understanding the problem your customer has hired you to help solve)
and values (the bedrock principles that guide your activities).
Clarity
is a constant challenge, particularly in large organizations with multiple
business units and geographic theaters of operations: Associates and executives
come and go; competitors thrust and parry; customers evolve; technology
disrupts. You must balance short- and long-term interests as well as the needs
of diverse stakeholders. Each of these can create distortions and distractions.
When you gain clarity on purpose, values, and performance, you foster agility
throughout the organization. You enable order without having to control every
action and decision. That’s leadership.
As
you contemplate the outcomes you achieve — for better or worse — ask yourself
about clarity. Ask others and accept their honest feedback. Often, poor
signal-to-noise ratio in internal feedback loops results in less clarity than
you imagine.
Shift
3: From they to you.
For too long, individuals have looked to
their organizations to tell them how to develop as leaders, and this competency
model has dictated the training agenda. According to Jay Conger of the Marshall School of Business and Douglas
Ready of MIT’s Sloan School, competency models offer the advantages of
“clarity, consistency, and connectivity [with other HR processes].” But Conger
and Ready also point out that competency models have significant limitations
because they tend to be complicated, often with 30 to 50 components; conceptual
in that they usually are based on a leadership ideal; and are built on current
realities rather than future needs.
Let
me add to their analysis that the traditional model was designed to assess and
mold people based on the needs of the enterprise — what the company wants. The
models do not fully consider the individuality of each person being pushed
through the Play-Doh mold and how that person might make a distinct leadership
mark. They also tend not to include some of what we at the NPLI have found to be important
leader characteristics, such as embracing complexity, exhibiting curiosity, and
actively recruiting strong people to your team. These are tough to assess with
standard pre- and post-training tools.
Ask
yourself: What are you doing to improve your leadership capacity and
capability? What are you doing to push your boundaries and test your
limitations? How are you getting ready for where you ultimately want to
be beyond the next rung of the ladder?
You
are likely to work in many contexts and will not spend your entire career in a
single firm (or find all of your leadership opportunities in your work life).
In other words, you need to take responsibility for understanding your
strengths and weaknesses and discerning where and how you can make your most
meaningful leadership contributions. Most important, you must take ownership of
your own leadership development. With the mindset of a true leader, you can
take the best of what your company offers — and then seek out more.
-
Eric
J. McNulty is the director of research at the National Preparedness Leadership
Initiative and writes frequently about leadership and resilience.
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Thinking-Like-a-Leader-Three-Big-Shifts?gko=7648c
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