Active Leaders: May 2024

Hi everyone!

A lot of people we talk to are finding the business environment more challenging than at any time they can remember. It’s tough trying hang on to talent and maintain performance while at the same time implementing cost reduction plans.

We thought it would be useful in this noise to give you something to think about in a quieter space: offer some ideas on leadership development, management and creating a learning culture. The idea is we want to share insights that are relevant and immediately helpful.

If something strikes you as interesting and useful, please forward it to a colleague, and tell them what you really thought. We’re keen to create conversations about what’s important and we’d really encourage you to join us.

Why would you want to read yet another newsletter? First, it’s an easy read, written in a plain language. Second, the content should be interesting and valuable. Third, it’s short and carefully curated. We promise not to waste your precious time.

It will usually look like this:

·?????? A good leadership piece from someone we like. It could be Adam Grant, HBR, The Economist or McKinsey - something we’ve found interesting and think our clients would want to read.

·?????? Insights into how we build a culture of learning with our clients, something we’ve developed real expertise in over the last 20 years. We're not talking about case studies; we’ll go into the how it works.

·?????? Quotes. We love quotes. People say such clever things!

·?????? Micro-learning. Short practical videos you can apply at work right away, or advice or ways to work through challenges.

·????? ?Podcast. Insights and learning from our podcast that resonate.

·?????? A video. Sometimes a talk, sometimes something beautiful, occasionally something funny.

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Leadership – Dual Awareness

Here's a recent article from McKinsey that we love. The authors talk about ‘dual awareness’ - approaching challenges with an understanding of our internal state and the external environment. Leaders with dual awareness can maintain calm intention, make thoughtful decisions, and cultivate a positive team culture.

It resonates with us because it lends a new perspective to some of the concepts we coach in Active Leadership:

1.????? Observing emotional reactions and actively choosing better responses that are more productive. I had a conversation today with someone about the vital difference between reaction and response - simply asking ourselves ‘what is the emotion I'm feeling right now’ breaks that involuntary reaction and gives us time to think about and choose a response.

2.???? Accepting feedback from different layers of the business to find areas of improvement, refine leadership style and strengthen communication.

3.???? Fostering a culture of empathy, trust and open dialogue so that teams to share challenges and collaborate effectively. We like this idea – we think that diversity and inclusion is becoming more and more about a sense of belonging which is built on trust.

This is the kind of article you can absolutely put into practice right away and that’s what this newsletter is all about. Enjoy.

Read the?full article here.

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Quote

“Good leaders build products. Great leaders build cultures. Good leaders deliver results. Great leaders develop people. Good leaders have vision. Great leaders have values. Good leaders are role models at work. Great leaders are role models in life." Adam Grant.

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Dr Mike on Unlocking Leaders

Great leaders have a focused curiosity. They understand that they can learn from anywhere in the organization (and their life in general) but not everywhere. By that I mean they’re not easily distracted by unnecessary information. Instead, they take in diverse views from their organization and their lives and extract the learning that is most crucial to their leadership.

The best leaders also apply that to themselves: they learn by reflecting on their own contribution, good and bad. They question themselves unflinchingly and answer deliberately and objectively.

Leaders learn from failure and success in equal measure. They don’t love failure, but they realize that failure shows us what we need to succeed. Rod Drury, founder of Xero, was asked what he saw as his biggest mistake. He said, “oh I never made a mistake, I just learned what didn’t work”.

Failure never stops leaders taking a risk. They know that failure is an event, not a person.

Here’s our experience of this kind of leadership culture: As leaders, we explain when and why we’re taking risks. We identify where our failures occurred. We do a review after every major job. Everyone on the project is invited because ‘where there’s insight there’s responsibility’. That phrase is one of our 3 core values. It’s on the wall in The Breakthrough Co office.

Just last week one of the team didn’t like our proposed pricing strategy. We took her feedback and then once again, she objected. Admittedly, we were a bit impatient, but what we’d nearly missed was a new and better approach for thinking about price. The lesson here for us was good leaders know a lot, but great leadership is sometimes about practicing being comfortable not knowing and trusting those people in the team who do know better.

A culture of learning must happen at all levels of the organization. It needs to be a deliberate strategy, agreed to and reinforced by leadership, reinforced in coaching and embedded in manager behaviour. That’s because the managers are the ones closest to the team where the culture lives. That culture is what customers and clients experience, for better or for worse.

That’s your brand.

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Active Leadership

This principle is so important, we’ve named the program after it. It’s based on mindfulness. We want to focus on those aspects of mindfulness that relate to leadership.

Most of the time we operate in a default setting: we learn what to do and we repeat it. Think about driving: you put a lot of effort into learning how to drive, but once you’ve mastered it, you don’t think about it. It’s a mindless activity until you must react.?

It’s the same with management: most managers learned how to manage by themselves or from their boss or perhaps from books and courses, but mostly on the job. It works OK for them, but they don’t know how much more effective they could be. And they don’t think about it because it becomes a default setting.

Sound a bit waffly? It’s not. All the research is clear and unanimous: It’s one of the keys to unlocking your performance. Progress and performance are not a matter of talent, it’s a matter of deliberate practice. High performers don’t practice for the sake of practice. They think about their performance as they practice and look for ways to improve. Great musicians don’t just practice what they already know, they also practice what they don’t know. They repeat it until they get it right, then they practice it over and over until they don’t have to think about it. Then they can focus on feel and technique.?

It’s also true of managers: great managers reflect on how they are providing coaching, for example, to a team member and think about how they can do it better next time. Then they put that improvement into place and keep working on it until they’ve got it right.

?It can all be summed up like this: We teach skills, you learn awareness. And awareness is the key to continually improving your effectiveness as a leader.?

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Podcast – 6 C’s of Leadership

In this episode, Ryan is talking to Mark McConnell, Learning & Development Manager at Argenta, the world’s only CRO/CDMO for animal health. Mark shares his 6 C's of leadership and opens about some difficult times in his life that inspired his book "The Prime of My Days".

Listen now.

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Microlearning - Active vs Reactive

Are you actively thinking about being a manager (being present in the moment)? Or are you doing the opposite, managing unconsciously on autopilot?

Share in the comments what inspired you in this video.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with your friends and colleagues.

Until next month,

Dr Mike

Founder, The Breakthrough Co