In today’s world, many leaders need to address complex, multi-boundary challenges at scale. To meet this need, you’ll have to develop your leadership mindset and skills, especially your ability to lead ‘extreme’ teams into uncharted territory (as the image suggests).
Much of the content of this month’s article was inspired by the book: Extreme Teaming: Lessons in complex cross-sector leadership by Amy C Edmondson and Jean-Francois Harvey.
Last month, you learned about the award-winning change management project I ran recently together with my associates. This month, you’ll discover how you can apply our unique six-stage methodology to your own change programme, with its focus on yourself and others (know yourself and know/support others).
Note that it’s important to accomplish each phase before you move on to the next, as each step builds on the previous one – if you skip or skim over a phase it’ll come back and bite you!
L to R: Lesley Pugh, Lisa Hancock (client), Rose Padfield, Emily Sun
As you might have seen in my recent LinkedIn announcement, The Padfield Partnership has won an award for excellence in change management, presented by the Association for Business Psychology.
The award was granted for a large change management project I worked on with two of my talented associates. Please read on to understand the work we did and discover the implications for your business.
This links to my article Start with Why: How great leaders inspire everyone to take action
Research often shows the first trait employees want from their leaders and colleagues is honesty. The second trait they want is for their leaders to be forward-looking.
Setting the direction is therefore a key part of your role as a leader.
You have probably heard the expression ‘start with the end in mind’ from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
In this article, we look at the points to consider when creating a vision statement. (I have previously shared some exercises to create your vision – see at the end of this article for links to Organisation Development parts 1 and 2.)
As a leader, a part of your role is to inspire people to take action – that is, when they really engage both personally and emotionally with the purpose that the organisation/team is trying to achieve, and will give their best.
Great leaders inspire by conveying a sense of purpose. People will follow you if you talk and act from the perspective of why you are trying to achieve what you are trying to achieve. Inspirational leaders set out the why, and action-oriented people work out how to implement it.
“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to walk towards, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever is left.”
Simon Sinek
This month’s insights are inspired by Inside the Nudge Unit by David Halpern. It describes the work he has done in behavioural science, especially with the UK and US Governments. It’s an interesting topic that companies are beginning to talk about.
Read on for an easy-to-remember model and ideas about how to apply nudge theory to organisational life. I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I do. There are also a couple of quick video clips that are really interesting, so it’s worth clicking on them too!
Designing and planning for change takes much time and effort, only to find that the execution fails or the intended benefits are not realised. This article looks at some of the things you can do to increase your chances of successfully leading personal or organisational change.
This month, we focus on how to motivate employees in today’s more complex world. It links to my articles about positive psychology and employee engagement. You might also wish to revisit the evolution of business paradigms in creating a values-driven organisation.
Disruptive change comes about when your industry faces complete upheaval. It could be driven by a small nifty competitor coming into your market and turning it upside-down with new products or way of serving customers, by new technology that renders your products obsolete, or by a pandemic that leads to travel restrictions.
The way you approach disruptive change is critical to your success – you have to respond quickly and with a fresh approach in order to survive, let alone thrive. This article gives you food for thought, with some of the latest thinking on the topic.