If you’re in a leadership team, chances are you’ve had a rough time of it lately. If you’re leading an established organisation, the market is ever shifting with smaller, newer competitors snapping at your heels, whose ability to enter the market with smaller and often more innovative offerings is made easier by their lack of organisational baggage. If you’re leading one of those newer, smaller organisations, your challenge is to retain the characteristics that allowed you to develop this far and to scale without inheriting the organisational and technical debt of your larger scale competitors.
Customers are expecting more from you – more products, better prices, more channels to access services. Your desired organisational and cultural model, based on modern leadership principles, is dependent on hiring the right people. But hiring the right people is dependent on you already having this modern organisational and cultural model!
A traditional leadership approach in these kinds of uncertain times would be to increase the level of control and top-down management, with a belief that by increasing the presence of day-to-day management figures and reporting, we can control the uncontrollable.
This, of course, is a fallacy. Traditional management and leadership styles are a limiting factor in modern organisations. So where do modern leaders start?
Modern theories of leadership are centred around servant and adaptive leadership styles. Leaders are encouraged to reject the hierarchical and control based view of business and instead facilitate change by working through teams. To successfully operate in this way, leaders and leadership teams need to exhibit some key qualities:
- Creator
Creators create. It sounds glib, but it is that simple. They create a compelling vision of what could be. They will create an alternative to the heavyweight processes you currently follow. They will find ways around problems in your organisation and keep you from becoming static.
Traditionally, creators are undervalued. This is because in traditional organisations, we don’t create things, we manage things. In modern, innovative and adaptive organisations, creative people are highly valued as a driving force in responsively shaping your organisational ecosystem.
- Communicator
A vision alone is without value until it is universally understood. This is why communicators are important. Effective communication of organisational vision, goals and strategy is the key that unlocks the ability to work in a flatter hierarchy. With a clear sense of purpose comes the ability to work in a highly aligned way. Helping teams to be aligned to a vision is a key function of a modern leadership team, as is listening and understanding the challenges teams face in execution.
Communicators also serve to build and develop relationships. Setting the foundations of good communication in an organisation helps develop critical facets of the modern ecosystem like empathy and trust.
- Pragmatist
You have a vision and this is universally understood. However, the world around you will change and this will have an effect on your organisation and plans for the future. The pragmatist sees this. They are firmly grounded in the reality of the current situation and provide a healthy tension between the reality of where you are, and the vision of where you are trying to get to. The pragmatist understands the value of taking an evolutionary approach towards achieving your vision and goals.
They will help to weigh the benefit of different strategies and find an effective way of delivering outcomes.
- Analyst
The analyst is continually evaluating how you are doing along the journey. They are looking for data to understand if you are doing the right thing to achieve the desired outcomes. This quality is important as it enforces good ‘test and learn’ practices across the organisation to support an evolutionary and adaptive mindset.
It is the analyst who provides the insight that allows key leadership decisions round delivering outcomes.
- Defender
Modern organisations take an evolutionary approach to delivering their products and services. This involves considerable autonomy and the freedom to test and learn. To do this, teams need safety to try new things, fail and learn from their failures (and successes!) The defender creates space for the organisation to grow by trying new things and learning from them. They understand that the value of trying something now does not always translate immediately into the bottom line.
The defender combats fear, negativity and doubt by championing the vision and data-led decision making of the leadership team.
Modern leadership is tough, and as a leader being good at all of these things can be difficult. But the good news is that you don’t have to be good at all of these things individually. A well-balanced leadership team should include people who demonstrate one or more of these traits. The key to success is a well-balanced team collaborating to get the best from these diverse qualities.