Why Excelling at Your Job Isn’t Enough Today (Questions to Ask Yourself if Your Leadership Style is Too Basic)

As a leader you know you need to keep your eyes on the horizon – which innovations will propel your organization forward (e.g., enhance existing ideas and challenge established notions). Sometimes, and especially in the context of your current dynamism and volatility, the amount of current demands makes us more focused on excelling in the present and we lose focus on both the next key objectives for future growth and equally important on yourself.

What you can and must do is invest in proactiveness – act in advance and focus on intended future outcomes. Here are 3 key areas to focus on:

1. Challenging the status quo: The human brain favors the status quo. In the absence of a deliberate plan to challenge it, you’ll keep doing what you’ve been doing. Staleness and lack of movement creates rust. Are you still challenging yourself, your team, and the status quo (e.g., is it time to fundamentally shift your business model to add more services; time to better align the company’s priorities for sustainability)?
2. Growth mindset: For organizations, a growth mindset means a culture of experimentation and learning, where innovation is valued, risks are supported and challenges are learning opportunities. As much as we talk about the growth mindset, we may not walk it. In which ways have you shown learning agility – mental, people, result, change agility and self-awareness? You’re turned towards others. Do you invest internally so you can continue to evolve and adapt, particularly as AI comes to our workplaces.  For example, do you regularly share your own failed experiments and learnings?
3. Build a strategy for your own resilience: You have a strategy for your business unit – do you have one for your resilience? Resilience is the key ingredient without which any good plans and intentions won’t be as optimized.

Now, which behaviors and actions can you take to implement the above key priorities to enhance innovation and external/internal motivation. Here are 5 ways to make sure you’re looking ahead and inspiring your team to do the same:

1. Promote and reward risk acceptance in your leadership strategic plan: encourage experimentation as a way to support preference for risk mitigation and control. For example, you likely have team members whose focus is solely on risk management but you still need them to innovate – when supporting experimentation, much like scientists do, trying new ways that may or may not work become a hypothesis to be tested, something that even the most risk averse may be more open to consider – and may even value.
2. Upskill/reskill yourself and others: identify beliefs you’ve held until now and that you need to let go of; identify new ones to adopt given what’s on the horizon and consider a new direction for your continuing development investment. This may lead to you expanding your professional development investment in new areas such as technology, analytics, AI for example. You’ll also support an overall culture of learning and risk taking.
3. Build a multi-disciplinary set of teams with the mindset of future planning with resilience planning at the helm: plan project teams and interactions between individuals with a variety of perspectives and from cross-sectional departments and levels i.e.meetings should not be only leadership but incorporate junior talent perspectives. This will convey the confidence you have in incorporating diverse voices in problem solving.
4. Optimize feedback: seek feedback with humility (research shows that despite our best intentions, we tend to react in a defensive way). Be open minded and committed to ongoing development, whether you connect with your executive coach or speak with a peer at least once per quarter, having a commitment in your agenda is often the only way it happens. Share with your team the constructive feedback you’re working to implement, because when you do so you are increasing how much they trust you, something you all need to create a culture of psychological safety – a culture in which we can take risks.
5. Develop your strategic resilience plan and include networking: start with clarity on your internal and external contexts, your own values, and what currently demands and give you energy. From there, identify three strategic pillars to invest in, and under each a few actions (tactics) to implement.  If it makes sense, incorporate networking as a pillar in your resilience strategic plan. Social interactions are in the top tier behaviors to optimize resilience, alongside exercise, nutrition and sleep. Yet, this is the one most leaders let go of. Identify and engage in specific next actions and conversations with other leaders of your level outside of your organization. Which leader(s) can you make sure you have lunch with in the next quarters? Is there a peer group that you could consider joining?  For others, specifically following-up for a one-on-one conversation with an individual met at a senior leadership exclusive event.

Doing the core responsibilities of leadership with current P+L will always be a today focus but when you set aside time each week to incorporate aspects of innovative and resilience planning, you will see a shift in open communications and energy both from you and your team.

Written by Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier.

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