3 Useful Mental Models

This leadership blog post is a continuation of me sharing content from my upcoming leadership book, “Strategic Pause: Grow Your Personal Leadership Model.” I am on track to publish in September.

Mental models are helpful in assessing situations. They help you understand situations by putting them in simple terms. They aid in determining your best response. They enable you to better see long-term impact. Whether you know it or not, you use mental models all the time. The “Golden Rule”, “Never lose your composure in front of the team”, or “Return all phone calls by the end of the day” are simple examples. In my leadership book, I refer to them as “leadership templates.”

In my January leadership blog post, “Turbocharge Situation Management with Leadership Templates”, I shared three leadership templates that made it into my leadership book. In this blog post, I am sharing three more.

The first leadership template is helpful is assessing your overall skillset. It can help you determine where to focus your professional development.

The Skills Pie (Leadership Template)

The skills pie is an example of one leadership template that is in my inventory but not explicitly in my leadership model.

Skills come in three types: conceptual, interpersonal, and technical. Conceptual is the ability to think. It includes understanding, simplifying, organizing, and creating. Interpersonal is the ability to relate and communicate. Technical is knowing how to do something specific, such as programming in a specific language or using a spreadsheet application. In my leadership coaching, I challenge my mentees to create multiple skills pies. Which skills are they using today to add value and at what percentage? What do their current and next roles require in terms of a skills pie? When comparing skills pies, you can identify opportunities for professional development. Note that skills pie sizes will vary based on the person. Some will have bigger pies because they have more skill.

Below are three sample skills pies. The assigned percentages are my interpretation.

The second leadership template is helpful is creating strategy. Objectives and strategy do not generally fall out of the sky. They are the result of applying a frame, a mental model, to your market in order to identify the opportunities.

Best Practices + 1 (Leadership Template)

The “follower” strategy is one of the most common strategies. I alluded to it when we covered sustainable competitive advantage. It means not having a strategy of your own. It is surveying the market leaders and copying their approach. This is sometimes modified as a “fast follower” strategy, where the focus is on copying the leader more quickly than other companies.

A better way is enhancing the follower strategy as “Best Practices + 1.” Take the market-leading strategy and add at least one improvement. Ideally, the improvement originates from your value proposition. You see this strategy across most industries. The proliferation of features in mobile phones and cars are just two examples. When you are setting the objectives and strategy for your organization and team, seeing if you can improve on what the market leaders are doing is a worthwhile exercise.

The third leadership template is helpful when you are searching for the solution to a big challenge or opportunity. Often “powering through” is not the best approach to discovering a solution.

Strategic Procrastination (Leadership Template)

It has happened to you multiple times. You are working on an important challenge or opportunity. The right path forward comes to you while you are taking a shower or walking the dog. Even though you were not consciously thinking about it, you came up with the answer.

This happens when you arm your mind with the details of a challenge or opportunity and then give yourself time. Your focus filter scans your environment for ideas and your mind is looking for patterns that connect to other situations and solutions. Usually, you do this accidentally. You are unable to find the answer in one sitting and you decide to come back to it later. Why not do it on purpose? When you add a pause in your solutioning process, you ultimately generate more innovative and creative alternatives.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was writing his “I Have a Dream” speech, he understood this concept. He laid out the key objectives of the movement and reviewed historical addresses. Then, he intentionally left writing most of his speech until the night before. In fact, much of the closing of his speech, which is most famous, was improvised based on real-time crowd reaction. Had he written the speech weeks in advance and stuck to the script; it may not have had the same historical impact.

When confronting a challenge or figuring out how to take advantage of an opportunity, leverage strategic procrastination. Arm your mind with the key information about the situation and then take a break. When you come back to it later, you will have better answers. You may find that you discovered the answer in the shower that morning.

Do you already leverage some form of these mental models/leadership templates? What other mental models do you use frequently? Do you consider them part of your personal leadership model? If you are building or evolving your personal leadership model, I think I have a upcoming book to recommend!

#leadership #StrategicPause

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