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Innovations in Leadership
How to be the kind of Leader your people need
Navigating the Next Frontier
No matter what level of Leadership a person achieves – or the accolades and myth that might surround them – they are still just a person.
A successful one, maybe even inspirational – but a person. Just like everybody else, powerful Leaders are people, with their own wants, needs, worries and concerns. In more hierarchical environments it can be hard to remember that – and equally hard for those at the top to remember that every person working for them is also just a person.
For every Leader – whether it’s leading a nation, leading a multi-billion dollar empire or leading a smaller, quieter team – there are going to be specific pressures, but there will also be issues that all Leaders face. Concerns that impact all teams, all businesses, all people. No matter what, remembering that both sides are just people is the key to doing it well.
You’ve no doubt heard the term ‘VUCA World’, particularly in relation to Leadership and Leadership Development – because leading well in a VUCA World (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) means that the more traditional leadership models we saw historically – models built around top-down command and control – are inadequate for the needs of today’s teams.
If you want your business to thrive (or even survive) you may need to make drastic changes – to reinvent the way your Leaders work, the way your team performs, and the culture in your organisation. But how?!
What are the main issues your Leaders are facing – and what innovations in Leadership do you need to be aware of?
Shared, Distributed and Adaptive Leadership
Forget the old hierarchy; the time for formal structure and Leaders who dictate what’s done or how is behind us. Shared Leadership models are growing in popularity – and can be far more successful. Leadership roles are distributed across a team, with rotating responsibilities, bringing leaders with different experience, expertise and skills together for collaborative working.
This ‘heterogeneous shared leadership’ means that each brings particular expertise, different experiences both professionally and personally, and can potentially see solutions or directions for their teams that their peers might not. Rather than depending on one Leader, one opinion, this collaborative model means the people you lead can also contribute ideas, the barriers between the top dog and their minions is removed, and every person in the team is equally valuable to your success.
Embracing complex adaptive leadership (CAL) gives your people more autonomy, encouraging self-organisation and direction in workloads, and allows your teams to respond quickly to any issues or opportunities that crop up. Leaders are there to support, to facilitate, rather than to dictate or control, and tend to rise organically through the ranks because of their skills, the way they communicate and guide others, rather than through formal hierarchy.
Leaders as ‘Co-Creator’ not ‘Visionary’
The concept of a business mogul, a genius or visionary figurehead, is one we’re all familiar with – those who find their own enormous success, and who tell you how they did it so that you can replicate their achievements…
If there was one right way to Lead, or to achieve success, everybody would be able to replicate it…but there isn’t – because success is never solely down to one person’s choices, one Leader’s decisions, or one expert’s opinion. There are so many factors that influence and determine any outcome, and there’s no way to control those other factors to guarantee you get the same outcome. Despite that, there are still Gurus sharing their expertise, selling their methods, writing their books and telling their audience that they have the right answers!
Leading innovation can’t rely on one voice issuing edicts – your Leaders should focus on inviting co-creation. Great Leaders – and their senior teams – working in collaboration, covering three roles:
- Architect: building the right teams, bringing together a range of people, experience and expertise, structuring the culture and environment of the organisation
- Bridge: a multi-faceted role, connecting your internal teams with external networks, resources, or knowledge, and building a community around the business
- Catalyst: the action – someone who is bold, can inspire action in others, removing barriers, and keeping momentum
Rather than building a senior team with one figurehead in each role, each focussed only on their particular responsibility or outcomes, successful Leaders can evolve through all those areas – developing their experience and skills to enhance each other’s strengths, support each other’s weaknesses, and bringing the best from every individual and team they lead.
Using this model well ensures that your organisation’s success is less about hierarchy and more about influence, embedding and embodying a culture that fosters creativity rather than dictating it.
Great Leadership doesn't mean knowing all the answers...
...but a successful Leader knows who to ask, and what the right questions are
Innovative Leadership...
Human-Centred Leadership in a Psychologically Safe environment
The most successful Leaders are those who are willing to take risks – to experiment, try something new, explore something different…but being willing to take risks should never put your people at risk. Innovative Leadership only works when the people around you feel safe, and confident that they can speak up, voice their opinions and expertise, guiding their own path. Failure is inevitable – but how you respond to failure matters; is this someone’s fault or is this a new thing you’ve learned, together?
A working culture that fosters psychological safety means you learn from mistakes, your people can challenge directives from their Leaders, are rewarded for their bravery, and Leaders can admit and acknowledge gaps in their own experience or knowledge. Don’t fall into the trap of only rewarding top performers – that’s a sure way to guarantee that nobody tries anything new, or takes chances on change – and stagnation is the quickest way to fall behind your competitors.
Success is never down to one individual – it’s the collaboration and support of the whole team, and a Leader inspires and guides without putting barriers in the way of innovation and progress. Guard against criticism, enforced hierarchy or structure, let your people speak up and guide you in return, and never the ego of those in charge get in the way of new learning or opportunities. Your team may have a Leader, but that Leader is just a person – and no one person has the answers, or solutions, to everything – but the experience of the team they lead might include it!
Digital, Virtual and AI-Augmented Leadership
New technologies are always presenting new ways to work, to communicate, and to Lead. Understanding those technologies is vital – but remember that your Leaders don’t need to understand it all themselves – or know how to implement those changes most effectively.
AI is one tool that can be leveraged in business – but not if your Leaders try to incorporate it without direction or understanding, or if it’s used in place of human experience. Don’t utilise new technologies ‘because we should’, or you risk not only losing the talent and experience of your best people, you also risk alienating the customers, audience and network you’ve fostered so far.
Innovative Leadership requires embracing change and depending on ethical frameworks, to do it the right way – and using tech and AI as a tool to support the talent, knowledge and experience your people bring, not to replace them; dependency on the tech without the human interface will cost you progress, and leave you with huge gaps in the vital expertise and integrity your future Leadership – and your whole organisation – will need to survive.
Cultivating your workplace Culture: Innovation, Development and Growth
Leadership isn’t just about profits, or giving your people new roles or tools – and it certainly isn’t about hitting more targets or pushing your teams to do more, work harder, work longer hours, pressuring them to always deliver more. This might work in the shorter term – but it’s a surefire way to lose your best talent to burnout, to lose countless hours and performance to the cycle of recruit, train, pressure and lose every brilliant person that could be a future Leader.
Great Leadership means shaping your organisational culture: bringing a diverse team together, supporting their growth and ambition, understanding their needs, enhancing their skills, plugging the gaps in their knowledge. Removing the barriers between teams, encouraging cross-functional, collaborative working, without the silos or competition that would get in the way of shared knowledge and insight.
Don’t reward the best people – or do, but not only them – reward those who are willing to experiment, to try new things, to explore different ways of working. Don’t punish failure, explore why something failed, and how you can change things, learning from what went wrong to understand what to do right. Embracing learning and development, investing in the growth of your people, giving them the autonomy and authority not only to take those bold steps, but to support their progress with investment in their skills, and in the future they want for their own career, as well as for your organisation.
Encourage debate, discourse, feedback and questions – and understand that even the most senior Leader can’t possibly know everything their people know. Communication flowing both ways, with your Leaders asking questions, and listening to your people.
Be a Great Leader – just ASK us how!
The most future-ready, successful Leaders empower their people, and understand how to work with new technologies and learning in a way that still centres human values. Truly Great Leaders are willing to evolve, to develop, and to continually reimagine how their Leadership can unlock the collective potential of every person.
If that’s the Leader you want to be, we can help you to get there; just ASK how we can unlock your potential.