In this episode, Jenni delves into the broad issue of leadership – the skills and behaviours needed to avoid causing chaos in your organisation. Jenni shares the seven themes to explore when it comes to leading an organisation as well as the skills and behaviours needed to create an engaging and efficient organisation.
Find out how ego, integrity and accountability are all things we need to talk about when it comes to leadership.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
Leadership Alignment Tool: a diagnostic tool to help organisations refocus (previously called Panoptic)
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M Lencioni
Your Oxygen Mask First: 17 Habits to Help High Achievers Survive & Thrive in Leadership & Life by Kevin N. Lawrence
To keep the conversation going, connect with Jenni on LinkedIn and Twitter; ask questions and share your thinking!
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today I’m going to be talking about leadership, a broad topic, but I want to share with you the impact leaders can have on organisations chaos and how to address it.
In the next 15 minutes, we’ll talk about the importance of understanding your leadership style, consistency, and the risk of mixing autonomy and empowerment for your team. As I specialise in helping organisations go from chaos to calm, I’m going to leave you with tips and advice to consider how you can make changes or how you can advise those in leadership roles around you to make changes.
In my day-to-day work, I apply the field model, which is my model to organisations, and the three phases of that model allow me to diagnose the root cause of chaos and fix it with you. In almost every organisation that I work with, leadership comes up as a theme to fix.
So how does leadership lead to chaos?
For many organisations, there is hierarchy, and in fact, when organisations have tried to take hierarchy out, they have quickly put it back in because of our need for it as human beings; it’s part of what we need to function as a community when we get over a certain number of people. So, with hierarchy comes leaders and the challenge for organisations is that leaders are often in their role because they are good at what they do. I always talk about people being really good at making widgets and therefore being promoted so they’re not promoted into a role of leadership because they are excellent at building relationships with others or influencing people or leading people. They are promoted into that role quite often because they are good at the tasks linked to that function.
What’s important for any leader is to understand your own individual style. So if you are leading a team or leading an organisations, you have to understand what your style is and embrace that style for you. No two leaders are the same. And while we often feel compelled to compare ourselves to others, we have to find what is right for us.
The chaos can come from here. It can come from that lack of confidence or knowledge of who we are and how we lead, but it can also come from different places and diagnosing that root cause of chaos to be leadership really comes from conversations with individuals. So if I’m talking to people about different issues across the organisation, it might be that we identify a need to address leadership. Now we won’t identify that from a survey that’s not where you’re gonna get that kind of information but if you’re doing listening interviews and conversations, that’s where you start to uncover that there might be some challenges with the leadership team. And that chaos can manifest in lots of different ways. So it could be that the leadership team aren’t working well together, almost dysfunctional. And I often talk about Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team, which are worth exploring if you’ve got a leadership team that’s not quite working well together. The chaos can come from a lack of understanding about the impact our behaviour can have on team and others. This is often the case with leaders, managing directors, business owners that I coach, where they’re just not aware of the impact that they have on others.
Sometimes it can be an inability to change a, a genuine lack of maybe understanding, but also lack of ability to really change your behaviour, to adapt to the people that you’re working with. Sometimes the chaos comes from leadership changes. Even the fact that you might have a whole new leader in place will be causing some sort of chaos for people in the organisations so acknowledging that and what that means is important to do. That’s got a strong link to culture, which is often a big part, uh, of leadership and of organisations. Another two ways we can see chaos through leadership is through inability to make decisions and also ego that stops progress. An uncomfortable word there, ego, but one that’s important to bring into the mix when we talk about leadership.
There were lots of other things around leadership to consider, I talk about it a lot in my book and specifically the point that to lead isn’t always to change so if you are leading a team or leading an organisation, you don’t necessarily have to change everything. And I think sometimes we feel compelled to do that when we’ve taken on a leadership role that might feel new to us, and therefore we want to make things very different. You don’t always have to do that, So I’d encourage you to take some time to think about what that role might look like. Listen to people around you and really get to know what it is that needs to be changed, if anything, and understand your style to help you lead better.
So, what do we do when it comes to looking at leadership and chaos?
So sometimes symptoms are identified by individuals, by the leadership team, by communication or HR. Sometimes they’re identified by the new leader themselves to say, look, things aren’t working well here. I can feel that my team isn’t working very well together, but sometimes they aren’t identified at all and through conversations about how to change communication inside an organisation. I’ll often identify leadership as a bit of a root cause issue to fix. Now, to explore leadership in this way means there have to be coaching conversations, there has to be conversations with the CEO, the business owner or the managing director, and we have to talk openly about what’s going on now. These are the uncomfortable conversations, and I often say we have to get comfortable being uncomfortable, and if we’re going to move forwards, we have to step into that space that allows us to change. My advice if you’re having these conversations is to have them in a neutral space for everyone. Have some one-to-one conversations, and then do things as a group. But if you’re working in the space of advising leaders, then make sure that you are doing that in a space that’s comfortable for everybody. It doesn’t necessarily need to be an office space. It might be somewhere else. It’s important that we feel comfortable to have uncomfortable conversations. So once we’ve had some of those discussions and we’ve had the information shared across the group, we can start to think about
How we go from chaos to calm?
Now, there are lots of areas to look at here. Firstly, there are seven themes that I believe you need to look at as a leadership team to explore where you are now and how you move forward. Now, these are themes that are linked to a tool that I use called panoptic, which is designed to rapidly help leadership teams refocus and drive change in their organisations. It’s about identifying the themes that as leaders, you need to be looking at to help your organisation’s change.
So I said there are lots of areas here to think about, and that’s because we’ve probably got two sides to this. We’ve got the sides to address that are linked to leaders leading the organisations, and how that needs to change. And then we’ve got the side that’s looking more at leadership behaviours and some of the skills that need to be mastered as leaders. So, let’s look at these seven themes first, because that’s the side of things that’s looking at the organisations in a bit more detail. And these seven are accountability, adaptability, capability, communication, connection, strategy, and velocity. So, I’ll just tell you a bit more about each one of those.
So, accountability comes up again and again for leaders, it will be in the skills and behaviours as well. But we have to explore how comfortable the whole leadership team is with being accountable, because this links to our ability to make decisions, to manage those consequences. It’s not about blame, but it’s important to explore how people are held to account inside the organisations.
Adaptability is about looking at how the organisations and the leadership team deal with change and failure. Failure is a big topic for organisations to get comfortable with, so understanding how as a team and how adaptable you are is really important.
Capability is the third. So, does everyone have the right skills to do the job well? Does everyone have the right skills to do what’s needed? And are there any gaps? And how do you know what they are and how are you going to fix those gaps? So having some conversations about skills is incredibly important.
The fourth is communication. So, what does that look like in the organisation? Is it effective? Do people have everything they need and want to communicate and do their jobs effectively?
The fifth is around connection. So very much linked to culture, so an understanding of how connected people are across the leadership team and understanding how connected people are to the strategy and purpose incredibly important.
The sixth is strategy, so checking to make sure that your leadership team have an understanding of what the strategy is, making sure that we’re all working towards the same goal and that that’s actually being applied. It’s very easy to say you understand something but how does that manifest in the day-to-day activities of the team?
And the final seventh theme is velocity, and that’s how the organisations moves. So how is it shaped and how quickly can it shift to respond to external forces? And that’s so linked to the leadership team and how they work together.
So those are the seven themes that’s looking at leadership linked to organisations, but as a team, there are leadership behaviours that I talk about in my book, influential Internal Communication and these are integrity and working as a team. So very much linked to what we’ve talked about there in those seven themes of looking at the organisations, but to be really successful as a leader, integrity is always very important, and that’s about doing what you say you are going to do. It’s very easy to make throwaway comments my door’s always open, but actually if you’re in meetings all the time or when you are in that specific location working, you’re not available at all. It’s very easy for people to start to see gaps in what you say and what you do, and that’s under the microscope even more when you are in a leadership position.
Working as a team is that second one around behaviours. Uh, and I’ve mentioned Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team as well. It’s well worth a read if you have the time, but it’s important to make sure that we are not looking at leadership teams as just individuals. There has to be a team element in there in order for leadership to work very well together.
But to create calm, you have to master the six skills of leadership. And these are the six skills that I believe we need to lead effectively to create an engaged team and also an engaged, broader organisations. This isn’t just necessarily about people that are leading, uh, an individual team, but actually leading organisations as a whole, this can have an impact on everybody around you.
So, the six skills that I believe you need to master are compassion, looking after yourself. Respect, time and attention management, self-awareness, and listening. And I’ll talk you through those six in a bit more detail.
So compassion is the first one, and, and that’s probably something that’s come more to the fore in the last 18 months with the COVID-19 pandemic but this is something that, leaders are often told they don’t need because it links so much to being slightly vulnerable, uh, and having a bit of courage. And those things go very much hand in hand. So, to have compassion, to have that kind of empathetic lead. As a leader, it’s important that we understand what it is to be human. It’s important that we understand how that plays out in the workplace, and that we are there to make genuine relationships with people. So, it’s an important skill to explore and develop.
I’ve put the second one in as looking after yourself, which. I believe is so important when you are in a leadership position. There’s another great book called Your Oxygen Mask First that was published in 2017, and it’s a really nice, practical book to take you through how to think about your own wellbeing and looking after yourself before anybody else. You are the most important person, and you have to focus on your health and wellbeing to be able to lead others, and whatever that might be for you. It’s just worth exploring and making sure that you are looking after yourself. People have talked more about burnout in the last two years than ever before, and it’s important for us to recognize that in ourselves when you are leading a team.
The third is respect. Now this works both ways and it works every way in fact so respect has to be given to everyone regardless of hierarchy, and for some this comes very naturally, and for others it feels quite alien. So just make sure that the language you’re using, the tone, the behaviours all demonstrate respect that respect of time and expertise of others, making sure you’re on time for meetings, and just being mindful again of how your behaviours will impact on others.
The fourth is time and attention management. So, making sure that we are acknowledging our own ability to pay attention and our own ability to manage our time. I was talking to someone just the other day who said that they often flipped between tasks so quickly because that’s just how their, how their brain works, that they’ve actually turned their phone black and white to make it dull for them so it’s not a stimulating on the senses. So there’s lots of techniques you can look at around time and attention management. It will be a future podcast episode for us where we explore some of that detail around attention management but making sure that you’re spending your time where it should be and that you are asking others to spend their time where it should be to help you achieve your goals.
The fifth is self-awareness. So, knowing your limits as a leader is really something that shows huge strength. So, I mentioned that some of the sources of chaos will come from that inability to change, and that often links to self-awareness. So sometimes we feel like we’re doing all the right things. But the feedback will tell us that we are not, and that takes quite a lot of inward reflection and self-awareness to know how to navigate that change, how to grow. You don’t have to do that on your own. That’s why often people will have coaches and people around them to help. But an important thing to be able to have that self-awareness, to know how to change and adapt to the people around you.
And the sixth and final skill is listening. It’s very easy to listen, to respond rather than listen to understand and as a leader, we have to truly listen to what people are saying, whether that’s our team, whether that’s employees, whatever that might be. We have to really listen, and we have to listen and demonstrate we are listening. Sometimes that means making sure that you are taking notes. You are holding eye contact for an appropriate amount of time but making sure that you’re demonstrating that you are really listening. I’ve had several conversations with leaders over the years, and I will know when they’re not listening. Sometimes you get to know people well enough to know their stock responses. Or if they just have a habit of saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, you are not really listening to what I’m telling you. So, making sure that you are listening will pay back huge dividends.
I share a lot more about leadership in my book. I talk about the missing skills of managers, and I also get into some detail around how you can apply my model, the field model, to fixing things at the top. So really getting into that detail of how you diagnose against some of the symptoms and then how long it will take you to fix those.
In my next episode, I’m going to be talking about attention management. I want to talk about how to focus, how to be more productive, how to make sure you’re getting balance as you work. Such a big topic over the last few years, and something that when you’re working in a leadership role can be quite challenging to get right, no matter whether you’re working for yourself or working for an organisation. It’s often a big topic that needs some focus.
So, thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, so please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me, and there are details in the show notes on how you can stay in touch.
