Leadership: Plain and Simple - by Steve Radcliffe
Date read: 2018-09-30How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
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Quick read on how to lead whether you're in a managerial position or not. Using the FED (Future, Engage, Deliver) approach, it mirrors a lot of other manager books out there. Good for non and new managers.
Contents:
My Notes
Everyone can be a leader and make a bigger difference whether it’s to your career, your performance, the relationships you have with colleagues or the quality of life you have at home.
You need to have an ambition, dream or goal for your team, organisation, colleagues or yourself and it’s got to matter to you.
There are only three aspects to leading that you’ve got to grasp. They are Future, Engage, Deliver.
Future–Engage–Deliver Model:
- Leading always starts in the Future.
- If you want the help of others to create that Future, you’ll need to Engage them.
- In Deliver, you make things happen.
Engaging others is a two-way interaction and it’s something that happens inside your relationships. To be fully effective, you’ll need to engage people in yourself, as well as in the Future you want to create, and this calls for qualities like integrity, openness and consistency.
You identify the specific ways in which you want to grow as a leader; you tell selected colleagues and ask them to rate you in these areas now; you then ask them if they’ll watch out for you in these areas because you’d like to talk to them regularly about what progress you’re making. And do this whether you have a 360 degree feedback process in place or not.
Leaders who are in touch with a Future that matters to them allow it to guide what they think and how they act every day.
Leadership is not about your competencies, skills and personality. It’s first and foremost about being in touch with what you care about and then going for it.
Question 1 What do you care about?
Question 2 What do you want to lead for?
The job here is to link ‘what you care about’ to what is real, tangible and specific. So, what do you want to actually make happen in the Future you want?
Being a master of context involves being able to see not whether we are climbing the ladder successfully but whether it’s leaning against the right wall!
Ask yourself, ‘Am I thinking from the present or past, or am I being Guided by the Future I Want?’
As a leader, you have to create the time to stand back, see and embrace the big picture, the whole – this is critical to you developing your Future Leadership Muscles.
When you’re feeling good and your energy is high, just pause now and again. Make sure people are with you.
If you want to have more impact as a leader, you need to be more conscious of what’s going on around you and crucially become more aware of who you are being in every moment. This gives you the chance of choosing to be at your best in that moment.
I decided we needed a change of gear so I said, ‘Ok, we are going to do something different now. I want you to go outside and sit alone for 20 minutes and write down your answers to two questions. They are, “What do you care about?” and “What is the future organisation you’d be proud to help build, i.e. what do you want to lead for?” I then want you to come back in and share your answers with your colleagues.’
When they returned I then requested, ‘Each of you please share your answers but the question I want you all to answer when everyone has finished is, “What did you hear the group say?”’
for groups to be truly ‘up to something together’ they not only need a shared view of the Future They Want but also a shared view of three characteristics of The Gap: Size Commitment Urgency
So the job here for a team is not only to have a conversation about the Future but also one about the Current Reality.
How sure are you that all the players see the same size of Gap? How committed do your colleagues seem? How could you get to know for sure? How urgent would you like colleagues to be compared with how they seem? What would it look like if you were sparking conversations to help people get this clear and so build alignment even further?
So given the Future We Want and the size of The Gap, what are the tangible aspects of the organisation that we must focus on now?
To create the Future We Want, what culture will we need in the organisation and how different will that be from the one we have today?
Given the above answers, who is the team we want to be and how will we work together?
How will we need to grow both as a team and individually to pull all this off?
What do we need to do next to build further momentum?
Engage is about your impact on others, how you connect with them, how you stimulate their thinking and impact their energy. You still need self-awareness but in Engage you must also be aware of the situation and how people are behaving and feeling around you. This is the ‘emotional intelligence’ territory.
Basically, to get things done, we first generate Possibilities and Ideas of what could be. We then choose certain Opportunities and Priorities that we’ll plan and focus on. And then we’ll take Actions inside those Opportunities. And this leads to Results.
You have to have Relationships big enough to get the job done.
Leadership is about what you’re like and how you come across, not what techniques you’ve got to bring to the party or what processes you want to put in place.
If people feel listened to by you, feel that their opinion matters to you, believe that you actively want them involved, and get acknowledged by you, then you’ll be going a long way to engaging them. At best, your relationship with them gives them a feeling of being in partnership with you, up to something together.
You will engage people more by valuing them and asking them to be involved in the thinking about the Future rather than you simply delivering a finished vision.
Leaders make Big Requests.
Ask yourself the question, ‘If I could have anything at all here, what would it be?’ Then practise making the Request.
In Leader Mode, your first thought is not ‘what shall I do?’ It’s ‘who do I want to Engage and what is the Request I want to make of them?’
To excel in Deliver, you must first have done a great job in Future and Engage.
This is captured in the story of the two stone-carvers. You meet the first one and ask him what he’s doing and he replies, ‘I’m carving stone’. You then ask the second, more motivated carver and he says, ‘I’m building a cathedral’.
So excellence in Deliver first requires excellence in Future and Engage. If you’re not seeing the levels of delivery you want from others, first think through what sort of job you’ve done in Future and Engage.
“Vision without Action is merely a dream. Action without Vision is merely passing time. Vision with Action can change the world.” -Nelson Mandela
So keep on asking yourself big picture questions like, ‘What’s our overall purpose here?’, ‘What does glorious success look like?’
Robust Dialogue. That is, adult to adult, straightforward, grown-up conversation that gets to the truth of the matter. Different points of view are listened to and, when decisions are made, they are committed to.
Your first and foremost job as a leader is to manage your own energy, and help manage the energy of those around you.
One way of looking at people is as a walking bundle of Four Energies which constantly interact and feed off each other:
- Intellectual Energy - It drives curiosity, creativity, planning and focus. It’s also behind criticism and finding fault. It’s needed to help people be organised but too much of it can suppress passion and enthusiasm.
- Emotional Energy - When it’s strong and positive, people feel listened to, valued, cared for, even special. This is an essential energy for effective teamwork, partnership, alignment and collaboration.
- Spirit Energy- It’s strongly linked to your passion, the Future and a sense of possibility. Spirit Energy is a crucial leadership energy because it brings hope and optimism to people, and so has them feel more ready and confident to build the Future. It’s the energy that comes with people knowing the why of what they are doing, having a sense of purpose, being inspired and having aspirations.
- Physical Energy - This energy is also a key part of our vitality and helps us be alert and maintain concentration and commitment.
When your Spirit Energy is up, you’re alive with what’s possible. It’s easier to see the big picture, the whole. You can quickly connect with the ‘why’ you are doing something.
For teams to perform, it’s also important to build people’s Relationship to the team.
My experience, backed by others’ research, is that in high-performing teams the members are not only committed to the success of the team, they are also committed to the success of each other.
When you are a Leader of the Whole, your main focus is having the whole team succeed rather than just your part.
If you really want the team to succeed, you must have the right mix of skills and experience on the team. And there will be no room for passengers. Set your standards high when choosing team members and have Robust Dialogue with those who aren’t performing.
One way to announce to yourselves and others that you mean it is to purposely get some Early Wins or take some overt, untypical decisions or actions which make people sit up and take notice.
The way that organisations can truly excel is by encouraging and developing leadership at all levels – help everyone be the CEO of something!