Leading with heart: Leadership lessons from an UNSW alumni course (2021) (Part I)

While by trade I am a young lawyer, fundamentally I see myself as a curious explorer and a self-driven challenger, to learn as much about the world and to broaden my perspective as much as I can. Yet most importantly, I want to leverage the knowledge that I gained to make a positive social impact.

In the spirit of lifelong learning, I recently completed a two week UNSW alumni course titled "Learning to Lead: Leading with Heart" where I had the opportunity to learn from four esteemed educators: Frederik Anseel (a UNSW Business School professor); Jo O'Reilly (a comedy performer and astounding improviser); Ben Newell (a Cognitive Psychology Professor at UNSW); and Ali Walker (a lawyer, author and a leadership and culture specialist with a PhD in group dynamics). I truly enjoyed the course (and in fact, this is my second UNSW Learning to Lead course following my first in 2020).

While change is constant and inevitable, the COVID-19 pandemic has truly thrown a 'spanner in the works' in terms of providing unprecedented challenges for leaders to connect, and equally for team members to trust their leaders in these uncertain times. In my first ever LinkedIn article, I hope to share these takeaways with those who may not have time/access to the course and invite you to reflect on how you can be a more effective leader in these unusual times.

1.Finding your own authentic leadership style (Frederik Anseel)

Anseel's approach of inviting leaders to think from the perspective of their followers is a highly effective one - and in fact, is a strategy I also use in my work where I am constantly assessing my work from the perspective of the client/end user. For leaders to view their leadership through the lens of their followers requires humility and empathy, as it requires leaders to acknowledge that what they may intend to do may not always be how they are perceived (regardless of how well intentioned they may be). Anseel highlights that the key to discover your personal, authentic leadership style is to ask the following three questions:

• Competence - Do you know what you're talking about?
• Reliability - Can I trust you?
• Value/Relationship - Do you care about me?

While competence can be gained with experience, reliability and value/relationship are more fundamentally intrinsic leadership traits that ultimately reflect leaders as the type of person they are. In uncertain times, it is possible that reliability can be quickly eroded through inconsistent actions by the leader and value/relationship can be overlooked as the 'urgent' triumphs the 'important'. Here, 'urgent' may be responding to client demands and the 'important' may be the interpersonal connection between the leader and their followers.

2. Decision-making under uncertainty (Ben Newell)

Newell invites learners to reflect more critically on the differences between uncertainty and risk, and the different types of uncertainties which may warrant varying solutions, whether it is the objective, statistically stable probability of aleatory uncertainty or the subjective, incomplete knowledge or information that characterises epistemic uncertainty.

Newell also introduced a new perspective that involves 'zooming' out of our daily experiences and evaluating these experiences in terms of where our learning and application experiences occurred, and whether these 'learning' and 'target' environment (and to what extent) they overlap. He demonstrates that if the environment in which you learn skills/content do not substantially overlap with the environment in which you are expected to apply these skills/content, a self-fulfilling prophecy can occur which can lead to misdiagnoses and searching down the 'wrong rabbit hole' for an elusive solution.

Yet perhaps the most powerful and profound takeaway I gained from his course, is a re-evaluation of the many biases that we, as humans are vulnerable to (many of which I had learnt from psychology courses in my university days). Rather than seeing ourselves as 'hopelessly biased', he invites learners to instead consider themselves as 'adaptive problem solvers' and learn to take the 'outside view' through following these five steps:

1.Select a reference class;

2.Assess the distribution of outcomes;

3.Make an intuitive prediction of your project's position in the distribution;

4.Assess the reliability of your prediction; and

5.Correct the intuitive estimate.

While the above steps may appear to be technical, I see it as a process through which the leader should take a step back after making a prediction/decision and pause for a moment to reflect on it further (i.e. ensuring all relevant facts are taken account of, or all relevant stakeholder views are consulted). Whilst leadership in uncertain times may call for decisive actions, it remains important for leaders to be able to 'slow down' at critical moments to avoid making the wrong and often 'rushed' decision.

Conclusion

While there is no one blueprint for how to be an effective leader, being aware of the factors that can affect the effectiveness of leadership decisions (and equally important) how such decisions are perceived by followers can certainly go a long way to helping leaders be more connected communicators. In Part II, I will conclude my review of the course with a focus on exploring how to build a leadership presence in these virtual times and what sustainable leadership involves. Until then, I invite you to use these frameworks to help you both in evaluating effective leaders to role model and also to craft/finetune your leadership style.