All Things Leadership

 I just got back from Australia. Touched 3 cities (Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane) in 4 days and spent another 4 days in travel. And as much as I dreaded the flights and the risk of contracting covid, I loved the conversations with L&D and business leaders on what keeps them up at night, the key strategic initiatives they are working on, and the innovative solutions they are building.

The economic slowdown hasn’t hit Australia yet and the corporate world and public sector there is dealing with acute labor shortage. While there are regional nuances, the CHROs and business leaders in Australia are trying to find solutions to same problem as leaders in the other parts of the world – how effectively manage CHANGE – in leadership, in business, and in priorities. Employee wellness, inclusive leadership, hybrid workforce, talent acquisition and retention are top of mind for these leaders.

 A few key insights from these conversations:

• It takes work to truly build and lead a distributed workforce. Transition to the “Team Anywhere” concept requires leaders to change how they think about teams – acknowledge that each team is unique, build team rituals that work for the entire team and not just its leader, establish a communication style that takes personal lives of people into consideration, and measure outcomes rather than time spent “at work”.
• Productivity and results should not come at the expense of employee wellness. Period.
• Empathy and accountability are NOT mutually exclusive.
• Everything is not urgent. If you keep adding tasks to your team’s list, without empowering them to REMOVE things from the list, you are setting up your team for failure.
• Learning is not optional for anyone. When a new leadership team joins a company, the leadership team needs to learn the organization’s culture rather than expecting the entire organization to adapt to the new leadership team. The leadership team needs coaching too.  

 It was clear from these conversations that the CHROs and L&D leaders are looking for holistic leadership development solutions that focus on both knowledge and applicability. While many agree that coaching is critical for leadership development, they recognize that the hard part is to implement it in their organizations. There is still an organizational expectation that the managers should coach their teams. While managers can be mentors to the team members - sharing their knowledge and experience and helping them grow, they ideally are not the best candidates to coach team members. For coaching, you need to provide psychological safety, confidentiality, and safe space for the coachee to self-reflect which is almost impossible in a reporting relationship. (DM me if you want to talk about coaching further.)

We all walked away from the conversations reassured that our challenges were similar, determined to look at leadership development through a holistic lens, and committed to building organizations that put the focus back on people – our most valuable asset.

 How is your organization developing leaders? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments.

Next month, I will pick up another trending topic and share insights. Make sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss out on next month’s newsletter.

And yes, it is ok to share this newsletter with your network :) #sharingiscaring

Resources:

·     Our distributed workforce

·     How to Build Psychologically Safe Teams

#leadership #leadershipdevelopment #technology #business #innovation