52 Weeks of Awesome Leadership: A guide for taking a few moments each week to think about the quality of your leadership!

By Michelle Loch

Whether you lead a large organisation, or a small team, or a community group, or a family, this book will provide you with useful leadership ideas, challenge your thinking, help you develop awareness around your leadership style, entertain you, and keep you focused on your leadership growth and development. It's about becoming a leading humans who leads humans, and it draws on the latest discoveries in neuroscience as its foundation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781458325792

Book preview

PART 1

LEADING HUMANS

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

George Orwell

Week 1

REWIRING THE MODERN WORLD

To lead ourselves and to lead others in this VUCA world we need to rewire the way we think, lead and behave

Michelle Loch

Leadership is never easy. But it can be easier!

I have been in leadership roles, and I have worked with leaders for many years, supporting them to navigate their leadership challenges.

One of the challenges with leadership is that it involves leading humans, and humans are unpredictable—they are human!

We have learned more about the human brain in the last 30 years than in all of history and this new science provides us with new and more useful ways to communicate and work with other humans.

This book is designed to support you in your leadership role to take time out to learn what it means to be human; to self-reflect and to make the effort to articulate your beliefs, your perspective, and your insights about yourself and about the humans in your care and how you lead them. This includes the humans that are your teammates, colleagues, and customers.

You may or may not have heard the term VUCA. It stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous and it’s an increasingly common way to describe the world we now live and lead in!

You live and work in an increasingly complex, adaptive ‘system’ which requires a new set of leadership skills and a new way of thinking about leadership. This new way centres on placing the human rather than the task or organizational strategy at the centre of your interactions, conversations and delegations.

It requires you to master how to ask powerful questions so that you can influence how people think rather than telling and directing then through micro-management. It requires you to understand how humans are truly motivated and to work WITH that motivation rather than against it.

To simplify this concept I have developed a leadership methodology that focuses on three key elements of leadership development: human motivation, self-leadership and powerful conversation.

Human motivation To lead humans you must develop a depth of knowledge and understanding of how humans are wired, how they are motivated and de-motivated, and how to support them to perform at their personal best. You must learn how to diagnose human behaviour that is NOT useful and develop strategies to prescribe more useful leadership approaches.

This knowledge will be critical in helping you to find and work with the TRUTH in a world where fake news and sanitised information is common and can create misguided chaos.

Self-leadership You must seek to engage in exceptional self-regulation and support others to do the same. This means self-regulating your emotional responses, managing your normal (but not always useful) cognitive biases, and being present to the needs of others so that you create emotionally and psychologically safe work environments.

The human brain’s focus on prioritising survival means that a sense of physical and psychological SAFETY is the key to productive human performance.

Powerful conversation Just about everything you do happens through conversation. It is the most powerful technology you have for getting things done. Most of us believe we are great communicators, but in my experience that is simply not true. The reality is that most of us avoid the tough conversations and are highly skilled at conversations that go around and around in circles getting nowhere.

When you engage in powerful, brain-friendly conversation you can achieve a high level of influence and help to create a STRETCH in thinking. Powerful conversations focus on the quality of thinking and work WITH the human brain not against it.

As you work through this book you will be exploring simple concepts and ideas around these three key areas of leadership and self-leadership. They will help you to build your mental capacity, your thinking capability and your confidence to lead effectively.

TAKE TIME TO REFLECT

Reflect on your personal response or experience by completing the self-diagnostic on the next page. Perhaps have your team complete it and discuss your insights and decide on some ways to do things differently.

A score of 1 is low, meaning that it is rare that the statement is true for you. A score of 5 is high, meaning that the statement is often true for you.

Week 2

FOCUS ON FOCUS

Always remember, you focus determines your reality

George Lucas

Organisations invest a lot of time and money developing and communicating their strategic plan, but there seems to be an ongoing challenge with the short- and long-term execution of that plan.

Some people jump on board and others, even though they understand and agree with the strategy or change, just don’t seem to be able to motivate themselves to productively execute over the longer term if at all. Some are resistant from the outset.

Those who were originally on board can eventually give up because it’s too hard to carry on or keep motivating others to come along on the journey. In most cases, over time, people will revert to their comfort zones and go back to doing things the way they used to. Humans are not great at change.

Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy in their book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Donei suggest that…

The absence of execution is the single biggest obstacle to success and at the cause of most of the disappointments that are mistakenly attributed to other causes.

They submit that execution …

•is a discipline

•is the major job of the business leader, and

•must be a core element of a company’s culture.

All true.

The consulting industry solution to this problem is to provide structure and task or project discipline. I hear words like rigour and following through and rewards. I see phrases like assessing organisational capabilities and ensuring accountability. These are all valid and useful, and I can see how they might be inspiring for those at the top grasping for answers to the human motivation challenge.

When I work with executive teams, they are skilled at talking the talk around execution (using many of the words from the previous paragraph). They know how it should be done, but they admit they are not very good at making it happen, even when they have a plan.

I see these approaches as outside-in or task-centred and I think there is something missing. I think there is also an inside-out or human-centred approach that is needed to complement the strategic and structured programs that are cascaded throughout an organisation.

To implement strategy (or even to keep people on task with their daily work), you need humans who are engaged with the strategy, motivated to make the behaviour change needed, and who have the drive to see it through. These humans need to be led by leaders who can clearly set the focus, keep the humans focused, and hold the humans accountable to that focus over the long term.

The human brain does not literally focus, it focuses by eliminating distractions so that you can focus on a chosen inputii. It uses filters rather than a spotlight.

Let’s face it, there are many, many distractions now-a-days that need to be managed. Apart from the obvious distractions associated with technology—answering emails and chats, getting lost in internet searches, texting and messaging – it is easy to dilute attention to urgent and interesting things rather than being clear and present to the few priorities that will make a difference.

This focus-management can be supported by the leader being present to where they and the team are focusing, and on building self-leadership individually within the team.

TAKE TIME TO REFLECT

Where and when do you notice that you get distracted or dilute your attention? What is your team focusing on that isn’t useful?

How often do you multi-task, that is, focus on more than one thing at once, yet feel like you haven’t achieved anything? What circumstances are common to this situation?

What do you think is important to pay attention to when Setting the Focus for yourself or for your team? What mistakes have you made in the past that you can learn from?

What do humans need so they can get clear on the focus?

What do you think is important to pay attention to when Keeping (or monitoring) the Focus for yourself or for your team? What mistakes have you made in the past that you can learn from?

What do humans need so they can stay motivated and interested on the focus?

What do you think is important to pay attention to when Holding yourself or others Accountable to the Focus? What mistakes have you made in the past that you can learn from?

What do humans need so they can take ownership and be accountable to the focus?

What action can you take to minimise, manage or eliminate potential distractions?

Week 3

THE POWER OF JOURNALLING AND NOTETAKING

I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say

Flannery O’Connor

Some parts of your brain work in a linear way—that is, they handle information in a logical and structured manner like a flow chart.

BUT your more creative and insightful thinking power comes from the parts of your brain that process information in a non-linear way when several previously unrelated and unexpected pieces of information suddenly create a new thought that makes sense. We refer to that as insight or the A-ha! moment, and it is insight that is a critical key to learning, behaviour change, creativity, and innovation.

The brain needs to be in a more relaxed state to achieve insight. Think about when you are most likely to have those A-ha moments—in the shower, walking the dog, at the water cooler, at two am in the morning?

Journaling, doodling, visual representation, and random dot-connecting can help you to experience those insight moments, particularly if you return to and build on your reflections and journaling over time by adding new thoughts and ideas.

One of the biggest challenges you have is to find time to think, reflect and imagine productively—in a slightly unfocused way. Take time this week to develop new habits around making time for leadership thinking and reflection.

Purchasing a lovely moleskin notebook—one with grid lines or dots—is a nice way to have a special place to keep your leadership thinking and ideas separate from your day-to-day work.

Reading back over your thoughts regularly can help you to get creative and to get clear on your messaging as your thinking builds and evolves.

I recommend that you avoid using a computer-based notebook for this kind of thinking. Not that it is wrong as such, but research