Take stock of your leader's mindset

Mindsets play an important role in “what we believe” and “what we do”, so this is a good place to start any leadership journey. Thankfully, mindsets continue to evolve over-time through our learnings and experiences, so there is always opportunity to take stock or reflect on the best mindset we should bring to leadership work we do as a manager.

• Leadership requires managers to reset their relationships in ways that “influence others and facilitate individual and collective efforts to accomplish enterprise objectives”; so it inherently means connecting and working with/through others through non coercive means.

1. Working Together in this context has direct implications for both what you do and how you approach your leadership activities.
2. It is here that we identify the single most important factor or key differentiator of an effective leader as being their ability to consistently collaborate well – think of it as a robust and transparent way of working together on enhancements/innovations and of fast-tracking individual and group development.
3. To remove doubt, leadership requires managers to move past fire-fighting and independent investigations and determinations and to spend more of their time/effort in a transparent collaborative mode facilitating, guiding, coaching and linking their teams/those they lead.
4. In practical terms, this collaborative approach to leadership goes hand-in hand with management routines, and both can be developed together.
5. Longer term, it will be a manager’s relational status or standing that determines how much potential influence they have as a leader – positional or technical authority cannot be discounted but play much smaller roles in comparison to a positive relational standing based on mutual reciprocity where our desires for trust, tribe and need are well-satisfied.
6. Like any other business process, enterprise leadership or people management can be standardised in ways that enables managers regardless of seniority or experience to build their confidence, and to leverage a shared mindset, skills and procedures in a consistent way.

Chris Ralph is OCG’s Principal in Organisational Development. He brings a track record in delivering sustainable reforms for clients through an expertise spanning leadership, organisation design, workforce behaviour, and employee relations and a natural disposition to work alongside executives, managers, and staff as they adapt routines and embed behavioural changes.

Email Chris at cralph@optionsgroup.com.au  if you would like to explore any of these principles in more detail and/or our suite of Leadership Development offerings.