Why courage is essential for connected leaders
Why courage is essential for connected leaders
We asked leaders in Singapore to define the specific emotions that are crucial for their teams to experience. Here's what they had to say.
INTRODUCTION
Even in the routine of business-as-usual, modern leaders face countless microdecisions and behavioural considerations that bear a tangible impact on their organisations.
This is amplified during periods of change, and framed the discussions at our recent Alumni Breakfast where leaders gathered to explore how to be more effective in fostering well-being, engagement, and courage amidst disruption.
The Courage Factor
Effective leadership requires courage. This is about identifying clarity of purpose, taking, and accepting some commercial risks with possible bouts of sacrifice and yes, even project failure. In circumstances where objectives fail expectations, it is the ability to put our hands up as leaders, acknowledge where we’ve failed, and change the scope quickly.
Mindsets change too. Effective leadership moves away from fearing failure and sweeping things under the proverbial rug to searching for facts, mining for insights, and taking best practices back into the business in a continuous learning cycle.
Leaders need to both connect and disrupt.
On the one hand, businesses need to be unified in a coherent and stable way by having a sense of purpose and clearly defined goals. On the other, leaders need to see outside the organisation, have a view of the overall market, and continuously challenge the way their business operates. This may include the way employees think or shape their assumptions at the most fundamental level.
Consistency is important - trust takes years to build up, but can be lost in a second.
Being courageous is to show vulnerability as a leader; break down the perception of invincibility and say ‘I didn’t get it right this time!’
The Agile Leadership Paradox
Creating this continuous ‘balancing act’ of enabling and disrupting the business is referred to as the Agile Leadership Paradox.
Business leaders are likely to face more business risk, adversity, and possibly even more short-term setbacks than any previous time, but the inability or unwillingness to learn from an error and identify or adopt a corrective action is just as damaging to the business as the mistake of failure itself.
The most important consideration for agile leaders will be business adaptability and organisational resilience.
The 5 P’s: Protection, Prestige, Pay, Power, Position
Key Considerations to be a Courageous Leader
Courageous leadership is also about setting the organisation and teams up for success with a balance of creating a focused, yet flexible change management framework.
It assumes collaborative communities will be more productive than star employees, and that good decisions and insights will come from all levels in an organisation.
Courageous leaders empower teams, delegate more and ensure the right formulas are in place for successful change management as well as tracking the progress towards achieving moving targets.
people-centric
Leaders should workshop and define what emotions or ‘Critical Success Feelings’ - be it ‘appreciated,’ ‘secure,’ or ‘connected’ - are vital for their teams to experience and that indicate a healthy work environment and engaged workforce.
Reflect on the evidence that shows these ‘Critical Success Feelings’ are present within the organisation (e.g., employee surveys, performance reviews, and personal interactions), and take proactive steps and question how as leaders you can actively encourage these feelings around the office (e.g., policy changes, daily management practices, personal habits and behaviours).
This is a really simple exercise to conduct with many benefits.
STARTING SMALL, THEN SCALING
Focusing on goals based on shorter iterations or those specific to a smaller team, while aligning with the overall strategic objectives, can create a decision-making environment where leaders are intentionally considering the involvement and emotions of their team in the here-and-now.
Moving away from rigid, static targets with long-term timescales, we should consider other metrics – such as objective and key results (OKRs).
This approach is more conducive for supporting collaborative, cross-functional or multi-disciplinary teams, and to consciously practice and learn before change is scaled further across the organisation
FOCUSING ON OUTCOMES
OKRs also offer a structured approach to navigating and aligning complex goals with purpose.
They are evolving to enable business outcomes, such as speed to market and improvements in customer experience, which are harder to achieve with a task-based approach.
Referencing these objectives in our decision-making, and taking in to account the future-state desired feelings of our team members as part of our key results has proven effective in various high-performing sectors including banking (e.g., Barclays), technology (e.g., Google and Atlassian) and manufacturing (e.g., LEGO).
We asked leaders in Singapore…
What are the Critical Success Feelings that your people need to feel?
Openness.
The more humble I am as a leader, the more the team open up to me. Then, the more we can all get out of our daily interactions and progress towards our goals.
Involved.
How many times have we, in our career, taken on roles where we thought we understood our place in the organisation, our KPIs, and it materialised much differently? If people feel involved in decision-making, it impacts morale, and morale is the most important factor to impact productivity.
Appreciated.
This can be the hidden factor behind money and compensation, but it also means showing you’re willing to go the extra mile for your people.
If you give one mile, they will give another.
Secure.
I remind myself to be present and consistent, so my team feel it’s okay to fail.
Security and Support.
Particularly when your company is going through major changes and you don’t know what’s coming.
Special.
When you’re establishing relationships, you treat individuals as individuals.
Conclusion
Our rich discussion reaffirmed the importance of courageous and reflective leadership, considering not only the tasks, but also the fears and feelings of their teams, in driving successful, authentic and sustainable change.
Leaders have the opportunity to show courage when they or the business encounters failure, encouraging the building of feelings of trust and connection, alongside a broader move towards test-and-learn approaches, and the ability to pivot when the data tells them to move in a different direction. Instead of directing teams and delegating responsibilities with static business processes, the focus of courageous leadership is also being part of the change.
About the author
References:
2. The Future Fit Organisation, Friska Wirya