Next Step Exec - does your operating system need an upgrade?

I'm back from a spectacular week in Amsterdam where I had the honour of being the E in TED - the Spoken Word Artist summarising the 8 amazing speakers talks on Decoding the Future. I was wondering what 3 insights can I share with you in this second edition? Well I'd like to build on the first edition and incorporate the theme from TEDxAmsterdamWomen. In the first newsletter I introduced you to values and beliefs and how we can recode these in ourselves to make empowering beliefs. So how do I know what mine are? I har you ask.

1. Leading Yourself

It's part nature and part nurture.

Nature - ADHD makes my time management fairly binary - I'm either now or not now, which makes repeating things very difficult, but crafting spontaneous Spoken Word Finales an absolute joy for me. I realise this natural ability, to be calm and fully effective in a crisis, isn't the norm for many folks and so it's important to work out what makes you tick. Often folks haven't had the time or space to review their own values, beliefs and principles so they are running an outdated operating system and still expecting to create excellent results in a world that has changed and keeps changing around them.

Nurture - If you want to find out more about your values and beliefs you can hop on over to the Barrett Values Centre and complete their Personal Values Assessment. Using this, I have developed an extremely powerful one-off session for my clients called Mantra Makers - where you craft your own new empowering beliefs that make you unstoppable. People have achieved some amazing outcomes after one simple upgrade session - like finishing award winning plays, pivoting their businesses and growing new products and services.

Every session bought I make a donation to Crisis - because altruism and giving back are coded into a fulfilling life for me.

2. Leading Others

A common mistake leaders make is thinking that if we tell people what our values are they will naturally follow us in the same way we live our values and beliefs. Sadly if people follow you and all you do is tell them to be Respectful, they won't know what that means in every situation so they will probably just do what you say. The power in values is the meaning we make from them and how well aligned those meanings are across teams in our organisation.

Did you know that we can measure this? We can do an Individual Values Assessment which compares your values with those in your organisation now and those in the desired organisation of the future. So, if values don't align, we can create development workshops to help you have meaningful conversations around strengths and values. You can also create your own leadership narrative or story to make your values truly live.

3. Leading you Organisation

Finally which comes first culture or structure?

Many organisations have structural change programmes running every year as if success lies in how you organise people on an organisation chart. Many organisations have never run a cultural change programme and I wonder - maybe they are trying to solve the wrong problem?

Structural changes that result in redundancies create a psychologically unsafe environment for everyone unless they have a very clear communication and engagement strategy associated with them.

The truth is - there actually is no ideal structure that lasts forever. In Leading yourself we've just learnt how you are able to change your own operating system - people are not static, we change grow and develop. The most empowering thing you can do as a leader, is to run a cultural growth programme because it's your culture, once optimised, that builds resilience into your organisation. When the culture is transparent and purposeful, people propose structural changes, grow and evolve their roles and the organisation together.

Imagine that?

A self-organising organisation. Now that is one I want to work with!

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