The Two Basic Leadership Behaviours

It helps to keep an eye on the long-term benefits and roles of the future. Leaders need to be transparent and help people in their organization understand where the world is heading in the next 3 to 5 years.

There is a need to transition the company culture as the current leadership roles are no longer sufficient. This is to ensure the company will thrive in the future.

• Just like we create the right learning space for our children at home, we need to provide an atmosphere where people can tinker, learn, fail and grow.
• Failing as an adult is difficult, but is part of the unlearning process. The right environment can make employees feel motivated and empowered while having some amount of challenge and healthy conflict.

Psychologist Kurt Lewin developed his framework in the 1930s, and it provided the foundation of many of the approaches that followed afterwards

• Autocratic leaders make decisions without consulting their team members, even if their input would be useful.
• Democratic leaders make the final decisions, but they include team members in the decision-making process.
• Laissez-faire leaders give their team members a lot of freedom in how they do their work. They provide support with resources and advice if needed, but otherwise they don't get involved.

• With a people-oriented style, you focus on organizing, supporting, and developing your team members. This participatory style encourages good teamwork and creative collaboration.
• With task-oriented leadership, you focus on getting the job done. You define the work and the roles required, put structures in place, and plan, organize, and monitor work.

The best style to use is one that has both a high concern for people and a high concern for the task.

• Asynchronous communication is when we send a message (such as emails) without expecting an immediate response. The recipient can take hours to answer it.

• Synchronous (or real-time) communication is when you and the other person are engaged in a face-to-face audio or video conversation, like a video call or a phone call. The information discussed is responded immediately.

Instant messaging tools like Slack or Teams are synchronous, and in some companies, email is also used as a real-time communication tool.

Team communication has increased by 50 percent in the last 20 years. We spend an average of three hours a day working on emails. On an average, Slack users send about 200 messages in a day.

This near constant communication hampers work productivity, with video calls, one-on-one meetings, e-mail and team chat leaving little room for actual work.

Organizations know how to measure vocational skills. They know how to measure typing skills for example. However, they are less able to measure passion or commitment.

Organizations hire and fire based on vocational skill output. But, getting rid of a negative thinker or a bully is much more difficult. An employee that demoralizes an entire team is hampering productivity.

If you've got the vocational skills, you're of little help without the human skills. The soft skills, or rather real skills, can't replace vocational skills, but amplify the things you've already been measuring.

For instance, a team member with all the traditional vocational skills is the baseline. Add to that perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, goal-setting, inspiring, motivated, deep listener, and you have a team member that will benefit the organization in exponential ways.

During a crisis, the chronological way to handle things is usually:

• Defensiveness and rapid reaction.
• Endurance plans for a potential recession.
• Making adjustments for a quick rebound.
• Reinventing and applying creative strategies for new opportunities.

Imagination is a challenging task under extreme circumstances and world-changing events like the current pandemic. It helps us go from adapting to the new environment to shaping it. A leader has to develop the capacity for imagination using the following imperatives:

• Carving out time for Reflection
• Asking active, open questions
• Being Playful
• Sharing, collecting and scaling of ideas
• Seeking the Unexpected
• Experimenting
• Not losing Hope.

Instead of increasing the number of productive hours, we can focus on getting the right things done in a timely way. We also need to restore and balance ourselves, our colleagues, family and environment, instead of a neurotic or pathological focus on deadlines.

Find out what's truly important to us and use the finite resource of time wisely.

Phantom workload looks like real work but results in massive unproductivity and even conflict in an organization. The pressure to meet unrealistic expectations causes a vicious cycle of further workload.

Leaders need to take a hard look at what is being avoided or not addressed. Facing difficult tasks that were 'swept under the carpet' earlier strengthens them further to make hard decisions and face difficult people and situations.

Intentionally design for the same interactions that would otherwise happen if people were in the office.

• Culture is what naturally happens when a group of people gets together for any period.
• A great culture happens with intentional design and influence. It's the reason you should make your company's mission, vision, values, operating principles, standards, and agreements visible. 
• Culture is experienced through emotions, including how your employees feel about the company, you, other leaders, and peers. That feeling is developed through human interaction at the water cooler, kitchen, or hallway conversations.

Your people need to feel your presence as a leader as they will have fewer opportunities to see you face to face when they work remotely.

• Regularly show up in a variety of forms that can include weekly video meetings, periodic company-wide emails, or presence in public channels.
• Err on the side of more communication rather than less.

• Positive vs. negative. Positive feedback confirms that someone is taking good action, while negative feedback shows what actions need to be corrected.
• Formal vs. informal. Formal feedback is given on a set schedule, and informal feedback is short and follows after an action or event.
• Annual vs. monthly
• Verbal vs. written
• Manager vs. peer

• Objective. Don't let your personal feelings get in the way.
• Timely. Feedback should follow when the event is still fresh.
• Constructive. Give respect and show that you have their best interests in mind.
• Actionable. Feedback must include immediate next steps.
• Warranted. Give your employees room for mistakes and learn from them.

A leadership signature: Who you are as a leader and how you view and approach the job. 

• Discover your leadership signature by asking how you lead day by day. Are you task or people focussed? 
• Ask people who work with you how they would describe your leadership.
• Consider the impact you have. Are you changing the culture? Driving results?

Sensemaking refers to the process of creating meaning out of the chaotic world around us.

We need to make sense when something in our environment seems to have changed. We collect data, learn from others, look for patterns to create a new map of the landscape. Then we experiment with new solutions to see how it will respond to this new environment.

It provides a framework for a group to arrive at a shared decision around one direction. 

While many resources offer frameworks for brainstorming, divergence of thinking, and effectively whiteboarding, this is a framework and a method to make decision-making, and tough choices with a team, so that convergence happens.

The surveys provide the input you need to plan and manage your change initiatives, your cultural transformation programs, your diversity interventions, your talent management and leadership development initiatives, and your customer feedback.