Can you swiftly change how you lead?

Leadership is a complex topic in theory, but in practice happens in critical moments. And sometimes in that moment, the call is for you to change how you lead. How do you do that? 

It is possible to refresh your approach to leading at any time and the response can be transformative, even with long term colleagues. You can transform the people around you, the organisation’s success, and your own growth.

Anti-Stagnation

Leadership can stagnate. You get tired. Subtly under the surface your whole culture becomes stagnant, disillusioned, drifting. You may be getting subtle signals, but not recognising them, that people are feeling under-led. This may coincide with your own self-doubt, after a tough setback or something in your personal life that is stressful. 

There is an inbuilt assumption in a lot of the literature about leadership, that it takes a long time to develop your leadership style, a long time to change that approach, and a long time to produce results. However, I've seen people reach a deep realisation and make a profound shift in their style in a few days.

Yes, it’s possible. 

You first have to allow the idea that you can  change your style of leading abruptly. Sometimes you must. There are some pre-requisites that make it possible.

Self awareness is key. When you accept that you are in charge, and know how you think, behave and talk as a leader, with your particular cohort of followers, you can adapt.

But it can't just be by instinct. A clear grasp of some conceptual framework around leading gives you the language and the technical tools for adapting it. 

It is not purely an intellectual exercise, because being led is for some people a human need, just as others naturally need to lead. A big setback, or any of the other triggers for your change, provokes the need to dive more deeply into what's going on emotionally in the organisation, what's going on for individuals, and what's going on for you.

This is tough stuff. You may be confronted with your blind spots, your mistakes and your fundamental human frailties. It is not a weakness to have frailties. Strength and courage arise by dealing with them. The way you deal with your own fallibility will be an indicator of your right to lead others. 

The good news approach 

At risk of oversimplifying, one of the ways to refresh leadership is to bring hope back into the frame. 

In particular, take action on values:

• Refresh the values, 
• Restore the meaning that values bring, 
• Reinstate and reinforce values where they’ve gone missing, 

Values are always assets that you can tap into. 

When leading a complex organisation, it's not always apparent when values have gone missing elsewhere in the organisation. Your role in upholding the values, particularly if the organisation has become cynical, believing that you will uphold profits before values, can have an electric effect on people. Revisit the values, model them in your personal behaviour and reinforce them with great stories that reconnect people to the reason they exist.

Setbacks and disillusionment also lead to a loss of self confidence across an organisation. This can happen even when the firm is otherwise perfectly capable, talented and efficient. Refreshing leadership may simply be a matter of reminding people how good they are and celebrating it. High performers are remarkably prone to seeing all failure as catastrophic and all other high performers as better. They need reminding of the balancing factors, the progress they’ve made, the forces they’ve overcome and the ethical compromises they avoided. Bad news can quickly become the only news on the grapevine but the good news you highlight, when it's accurate, carries truth and refreshes leadership. 

When people feel under-led, they lose sight of opportunity. Your role as leader gives you a privileged bird’s eye view to bigger horizons, by dint of the information you get and the wide range of people and ‘boundary riders’ that you deal with. So you are able to identify and to create opportunity more easily than most in the firm. 

You refresh your leadership when you can be genuine and specific in reminding people that opportunity exists, that you have a process for grasping it, that you need their help in making it real and that it is achievable. 

The bad news approach. 

Regardless of all the good news, secretly everyone knows that there's something amiss in the culture. (There is always something amiss in the culture of a high-intensity, high achievement firm.) The culture may seem polished on the surface, but carries a stench underneath. The longer that goes on, of course, the less you look like a leader.

So confront it. Get to know the underbelly of your culture deeply. Where exactly does your culture go wrong? Which culture and value words are spoken cynically because there are too many examples of the opposite? What isolated events have become prevalent myths? What do grumbles and complaints tell you about what ‘right’ looks like? 

The gift of delving into the bad news about your culture is that when you openly address its toxic aspects, for example by firing a high performer who’s a bully or a sly cheat, you act as the antidote. If people are feeling cynical, you must work diligently, not only to expect trust, but to create the circumstances that engender it. When you know your toxins, you can be a good doctor. You may even have some magic potions!

Bad behaviour of any kind that the firm thinks you tolerate or even approve of, corrodes an organisation's culture from the depths. There are reasons why people get away with it. One of the reasons is that your systems incentivise it and don’t correct it. There may be historical reasons for this, but you are responsible for bad design, even if you didn’t create it. The system may give people power who haven't shown they can use it wisely. High-performers can steal lucrative clients from their subordinates. If your colleagues think you know about it, but do nothing, you are the problem.

And new challenges will erupt. The role of the leader is precisely to deal with the unexpected. To suffer, to take a hit, and still be standing. To demonstrate to others what resilience, courage and calm in the storm really mean. Leaders face the challenge rather than deny it, gather resources, support people at the front and if necessary, go to the front themselves. 

Start with yourself. 

There are always reasons for optimism. In fact, there is a growing body of literature that lays out the simple effect of deciding to be optimistic. Of course, this is different from being unrealistic. So to be optimistic does not mean you shy away from facts or difficulty, but calls on you to read the world with a creative urge, and to understand how to create a process of innovation that ensures you will find a way through. 

You are a human, however, so it's natural to have the full gamut of feelings, when faced with a crisis, a setback or uncertainty. Self-doubt is natural, but it doesn't need to be a disease. This is where artful recovery is vital, though it may look like ‘doing nothing’. Understand that you are in a role, and although you're trying to be authentic, there has to be some theatre to it. This aspect of ‘role’ helps put a distance between what you feel and what you let show. This means that you have to hold and convey the feelings that motivate others. This is not to deny reality but to enable others not to suffer negative emotions to the point where it disables them.

In particular, celebrate the different types of energy you already possess, their sources, and how you personally refresh them. For some people this may simply be a matter of being clever about sleeping or specific physical exercise. For others, it is music, an art form of some kind, or simply conversations with good friends. Leaders sustain their energy well.

Knowing how to adapt your leadership style flexibly, ultimately means the difference between whether your firm declines, stagnates or thrives. 

I've been lucky to help - or simply witness - people in senior roles adapt, sometimes within days, to a call for a new way of leading. Just as actors on stage call on an aspect of themselves to infuse a character with truth, you already possess the wherewithal to lead well, even when things have changed suddenly. You can, with wisdom, trust yourself.