K3 Insights

I am lucky enough to work weekly with some amazing business leaders, or like last week meet new leaders (e.g. Rich Diviney) who have insightful stories and lessons learnt around leadership.

In thinking about what makes great leaders stand out during the times that we are in, I would highlight three key things:

1. Context Switching – Breadth of Perspective to a Narrow Focus Too often we see leaders who are great strategically but struggle to drive the right outcomes, or others who too readily get caught in the detail (especially if its in an area where they are a ‘subject matter expert’).  Given how fluid, complex and fast-paced our business environment is, the ability to context shift between bot these ends of the continuum is critical.  On one hand it’s the ability to maintain the strategic intent, scanning for possibilities and engaging with those who can provide fresh perspectives.  While at the same time, providing a level of informed focus to help unblock an issue, ask the right questions of the right people to improve operational efficiencies, or change up the resourcing on a key project if hurdles are being missed.  All before your afternoon cuppa!
2. Yes vs. No - Ability to drive trade-offs and prioritisation
   There is not a business that I am engaging with at the moment who doesn’t have a shortage of things they are, or could be, doing.  In essence, you don’t have a useful strategy if you just say yes to everything. This spreads out resources, slows down delivery and continues to put greater pressure on the organisation because of missed performance metrics.  Great leaders are ruthless on being very clear on how best they can employ the finite resources they have to hand (i.e. finances, people and time).  This then allows them to agree a very clear priority list that everyone in the organisation can align behind and importantly, not be ‘one and done’.  The key is how this continues to be an evolving, responsive process that allows opportunities to be considered, trade-offs made, and clarity tobe communicated.  Unless you have found a whole lot more time, money and people, the agreed number of initiatives should never change – what they might include can change, as long as they are well considered and communicated so re-allocations can occur if required.
3. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) through change - I am not going to focus on the broader topic of EQ as the value of this within great leaders is well documented.  What I am going to touch on is the role of EQ in change and specifically the different types of change activities.  When driving transformation inside organisations, we see leaders needing to excel in different elements – e.g. an ability to: innovate around change, align change to strategy in a robustly planned way, effectively communicate change, be a behavioural role model for the change, and lastly, be the change conduit who facilitates others to engage and drive the change.  A great leader knows where they have strengths in the above, where strengths lie across their fellow leaders and how best to leverage this, while also knowing what areas they might need additional support around.  Being self-aware enough to understand this, rather than either thinking you have all the answers or can do it all yourself, is fundamental to being a great leader during periods of transformation. 

Clearly exceptional leaders exhibit so many different things that narrowing it down to three is not comprehensive, but in my opinion the areas above certainly help to make leaders stand out in the types of transformation work that I get involved in.

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