In the eyes of David Williams, founder and director of Impact International, the role of the leader has moved away from the hierarchical position of command and control, towards being a provider of optimism, meaning, value, and structure.
Williams writes on LinkedIn that the leaders of today should seek to support, inspire and collaborate with people, seeking to understand them as individuals and empower them on their own journey to becoming leaders.
Change has always been, and will always be, a constant. But in the last couple of years, this change has accelerated at a huge rate. Large global issues are becoming increasingly visible, and more and more people expect their organisations to address them, challenging the great profit motive and placing greater scrutiny on their leaders than ever before. At the same time, people are also revisiting their own priorities around the work they’re prepared to do, how they’re prepared to do it, and when they’re prepared to do it. These shifts have led to what is being called The Great Resignation, and the way in which an organisation chooses to respond to these challenges will determine whether their people choose to stay.
The biggest leadership challenge of our times, then, is to embrace this change. It’s tumultuous but also exciting, and there are many examples of progressive, human-centred organisations that are finding ways to make a profit whilst doing good. The role of the leader in these organisations has shifted away from a hierarchical position of command and control, towards being a provider of optimism, meaning, value, and structure. It is about supporting, inspiring, and collaborating with people, understanding them as individuals, and empowering them on their own journey towards becoming leaders.
But how does an individual leader go about making these changes to their approach?
It’s hard, and therefore vital that organisations support leaders at all levels in doing so. In the past, this might have been attempted by developing off-site, multi-tier development programmes, funnelling people through them, and then expecting them to come out the other side ready to perform. But now this is shifting towards a more human-centred approach, which means getting leaders together and asking them ‘how best to support our leaders?’ It means developing a culture in which the capacity for leadership action is democratic and pervasive – a culture in which leaders develop leaders.
Here are four key ways of creating this culture in your organisation:
Engage and involve
People own what they create. So, if you have a change need, involve your people in it from the get-go – especially those who will be impacted by the change. Bring this group together, help them to experience the need for change, show them examples of good and bad practices, and then have some wonderful, quality conversations about it. With the right balance of facilitation and collaboration, this open dialogue will produce the answers you need. Further, collaborative change processes are rich learning experiences, cementing emotional engagement, increasing people’s confidence to lead, and making it more likely that they will step up to the plate again in the future.
Foster a feedback culture
Self-awareness is a foundational leadership ability, but too often in organisations, people are afraid of feedback – scared of confrontation, causing trouble, or hearing something they won’t like. Encourage a feedback culture in your organisation by bringing a small group of people together to complete a task, and then afterwards, ask them to discuss how well they thought they worked together.
Make sure this process is reciprocal by getting each person to invite feedback from everyone else in the group.
This may feel unnatural and unappealing at first, but open, honest conversation and two-way feedback are both measures of a healthy organisation. Once giving and receiving feedback is incorporated into your everyday practice, self-awareness is accelerated.
Model a human-centred approach to leadership
Human-centred leadership is, fundamentally, about understanding the people you work with. Finding the time to have regular one-on-ones with your team members will allow you to get to know them as individuals, as well as establish a bedrock of trust and empathy to build your relationship on. This understanding will enable you to provide them with the right balance of support and challenge, as well as empowering rather than instructing, collaborating rather than working separately, and enabling them on their own journey towards becoming a human-centred leader.
Create space for leadership to emerge
Developing a leadership culture is not about telling people how to be better leaders but about creating the opportunity for leadership to emerge organically.
One of the most successful ways to do this is to take an innovation process and throw it wide open, bringing a diverse group of people into a room to talk about how to achieve it.
This creates space for leadership to emerge from unexpected places. You can further enable this by providing the right conditions: support, provocation, openness, and challenge. Use this strategy to foster a culture in which leadership action can come from anywhere – a culture in which anyone can notice the need for change, decide what to do about it, and act.
By adopting these strategies and mindset shifts, you will foster the conditions for a human-centred approach to leadership, as well as modelling and sharing them with other leaders and colleagues across the business. This is how you will create the leadership that you think you need, by encouraging and inspiring others to develop it for themselves.
Photo by Natalie Pedigo on Unsplash
