Category Archives: Blog

Score orienteering – why?

What?

Score orienteering, in the form that we use it, is an exercise in working together as a team to develop and execute a strategy to achieve as many points as possible.

We use small areas with good paths. No compasses or advanced navigation skills are required.

Teams earn points by navigating to check points around a course marked out on a map and/or satellite photograph.  Each check point has a different value reflecting its distance from the start/finish and how easy or difficult it is to find. They have unique letters which are recorded onto a team card. Teams can split into sub-teams of 2 people minimum (one aspect of a wider Risk Management Plan) to cover as much of the course as possible.

Now here is the rub. Teams are given a fixed time to do as much as possible after which penalty points escalate rapidly.

The test therefore is really about developing a strategy and executing a plan to maximise return on the skills of the team and a fixed investment of time!

Want to know more about how we can support you and your team? Call/message 07776 153428 or email dave@freshairleadership.com 

Why?

We use score orienteering in our leadership team programmes for a number of reasons:

  • It is fun!
  • It is a great way of switching up the energy during the day.
  • The insights that emerge are strongly anchored to what is always a highly memorable experience.

With good facilitation, it invites reflection around a number of important areas:

  • Psychological safety. Did team members feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, safe to challenge?
  • How collaborative was the strategising and planning experience? How did people feel about what they experienced of their colleagues? How were decisions made?
  • What did colleagues notice about their natural team roles (after Belbin). Who were the strategists, planners, resource managers etc? Did anyone feel left out?
  • How well did participants appreciate the difference between the plan (the map) and reality (the ground). How might this apply back in the business?
  • Choices and trade-offs. How were these made in seeking an optimum route in an environment with opportunity and risk?
  • How were team members employed on this task? How were skills and experience canvassed and used to best effect?

Where?

Here is an example of a control sheet we give to teams (showing map and satellite photo variants). In this case the area is around the House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow.

How?

To finish on a safety note, events such as these need a thorough risk assessment and management plan. When we organise these, we use staff who are experienced and qualified outdoor leaders and first aiders, and a risk management process which has been externally audited.

Can we help you?

Our core business is helping business leaders develop highly effective teams. This post about score orienteering is just one example of our experiential approach.

Want to know more about how we can support you and your team? Call/message 07776 153428 or email dave@freshairleadership.com 

 

 

What? Score orienteering, in the form that we use it, is an exercise in working together as …

Jumping to conclusions

Have you noticed how easy it is to jump to a wrong conclusion!? You are convinced you are “right”. Yet others are convinced they are “right” too!

The Ladder of Inference (after Argyris, C., ‘Overcoming Organisational Defences: Facilitating Organisational Learning’) provides a way of visualising how you go from experiencing an event to making a decision.

It reinforces the value of self-awareness around how we experience the world and the assumptions and biases in play. A note of caution, however. Models don’t claim to be “right” but they do offer a way into understanding a topic.

  • Starting at the bottom of the ladder, an event happens which we take notice of as an experience. We sometimes refer to these as “facts”.
  • Because of our many different biases, not least around how we experience the world through our different senses, we can’t experience the “wholeness” of an event. Rather we end up with a personal sample.
  • We interpret what our sample of the event means by applying our assumptions, often without considering or even being aware of them.
  • And from this meaning, we draw conclusions.
  • Over time, and the multiple similar events which we interpret in a similar way to reach similar conclusions, we develop beliefs.
  • Armed with these beliefs, we take actions that seem “right”.

The speed of this process is such that it can appear that we  “jump to conclusions”. Without pausing to reflect, check the data, consult with others, and engage in critical thinking, it can be easy to jump to the wrong conclusions and make poor decisions.

How to use this?

Use the concept of a ladder to challenge or validate your own and other people’s views on a subject. What exactly are the “facts”? What biases and assumptions are in play? Could different conclusions be reached and different decisions made by inquiring into the event more fully and re-framing our assumptions?

Whatever, it is good to talk things through. Always.

 

 

 

Have you noticed how easy it is to jump to a wrong conclusion!? You are convinced you …

Passionately detached

Have you noticed leaders who are anxious and confused around when to listen and when to act?

I wonder if some leaders are being overly influenced by the never-ending stream of books on leadership. Added to which is a lot of energetic chatter on platforms such as LinkedIn.

These talk of psychological safety and models such as servant leadership, compassionate leadership, distributed leadership, and more.

Written as if they are cosy, accountability-shielding concepts, set in a single, unchanging, operating context.

They talk to the need for creating environments and setting examples which enable everyone to feel included, able to learn, encouraged to contribute, and ultimately to constructively challenge the status quo. And that is good.

Very few talk about context, confidence, accountability, and action.

Context, Confidence, Collaboration

I have watched leaders nervously ask questions hoping to promote a discussion with their team or a wider staff group.

Their body language and eye contact, and their verbal hesitancy, fluency, and volume convey a lack of confidence in what they are saying and doing. They defer in a way that signals a hope the discussion won’t be difficult. They aren’t really clear about the purpose of their engagement, other than a vague notion of it being a good thing to do.

They are acting out someone else’s leadership model. Not very convincingly.

Confident and competent leaders sense the context and consciously choose to “communicate at” (i.e. my point of view), “consult with” (i.e. still my point of view but I will give you a shout), or “collaborate with” (i.e. how do we create fresh insight together?). These leaders have at least 3 modes of context-relevant engagement.

Less confident, less competent leaders will feel uneasy about any engagement. At best, they will cling to the comfort of control that “communicating at” or “consulting with” offers. Fearful and adrift.

Highly confident, less competent leaders won’t just cling to these two modes, they will stick rigidly to them with relish as it is all about them, their control, and sense of power. Fearful and attached.

Confident and competent leaders artfully create powerful questions, model active listening, and facilitate a dialogue. They are passionate about achieving a higher collective outcome, and detached from any sense of a personal starting position. They let go to let come. Passionate and detached.

Action, Accountability, After-Action

Confident leaders and their teams will have worked out why (context), how (modes of engagement) and when (time is so important) they must converge on a decision and take action.

No confusion or dithering.

There will be levels of trust that enable constructive challenge, commitment, and mutual accountability.

No “my way or the highway”.

And they will continuously review and adjust their decisions and courses of action.

No “fire and forget”.

All in the service of the higher collective outcome.

Passionately detached.

 

If you are interested in learning more about dialogue or how we can help you and your team become even effective in your world get in touch. Email us at info@freshairleadership.com or call +44 7776 153428.

Have you noticed leaders who are anxious and confused around when to listen and when to act? …

How does your team measure up?

11 Questions

We help leaders build highly effective teams.

Whether you are a chief executive, Head of Function, programme manager, or leading across boundaries with other organisations, you know that stuff only gets done through effective teamwork.

And effective teamwork doesn’t just happen by gathering a group of good people together.

A great place to start is by co-creating a Team Charter. Answering the questions below will give you a feel for what this could look like.

Make a red, amber, or green assessment in the right hand column. Ask your team colleagues to make their assessments too.

We would love to help you, initially by conducting a one-to-one engagement with team colleagues before designing a workshop to create the charter, and a development programme beyond that.

Read here to learn more about how we work. And do get in touch by emailing info@freshairleadership.com

11 Questions We help leaders build highly effective teams. Whether you are a chief executive, Head of …

Why we don’t use psychometric tools

Let me share our operating context first.

We help chief executives build the capability of their leadership teams, and so we are typically working with individuals and teams of up to 12 or so. Small populations. Working closely together.

For us, psychometrics don’t work for a number of reasons:

  • Some participants can hide behind labels that excuse dysfunctional behaviours. They can believe their labels are enduring statements of truth about how they show up. “I am a Red WXYZ, and that’s just the way I operate”.
  • They are a seductive waste of time. It is human nature to respond to an online questionnaire carefully and perhaps defensively, and then closely study the well-presented report all about us.
  • They can seduce facilitators too into believing they are doing good work for their clients. Following the contents of a scripted report is not the same as stepping into the messy and difficult space “between the noses” where the elephants roam!
  • Many psychometric tools seem to have dubious foundations. How can they accurately capture the complexity of being human in demanding leadership roles in multiple, ever-changing contexts?
  • Lack of context is a problem. They present a snapshot, ignoring that we present different versions of our deepest selves under different conditions at different times.
  • For executive leadership teams the appetite for these tools can be dulled to the point of resentment or disregard if executives have been subjected to these over several years. Especially with different results. This in turn can introduce risk to the success of subsequent development work.

There are far more powerfully self-aware ways into illuminating conversations about how we individually and collectively show up at work, or wherever. For us these include context-specific first and second person reflective narratives and verbal testimony, workplace observation, experiential simulations of workplace scenarios, constellations etc..

What do you think?

Are clients missing out on some richness that is worth their time and money?

Do we need to revisit our position on this?

Dave Stewart
Managing Director
The Fresh Air Leadership Company

27th July 2023

Let me share our operating context first. We help chief executives build the capability of their leadership …

3 ways you are screwing your business and what to do about

Here are 3 ways in which you are unconsciously screwing your business and some thoughts around how to fix things.

PROBLEM #1YOU’RE LIKE A PIG IN SH1T!

You love the rough and tumble of operations. Doing stuff. Fixing things. Hearing the applause. Heroic. And at the back of your mind, you know two things.

STRATEGIC THINKING AND POOR EXECUTION EARN YOU A DANGEROUS RIDE, AND EXECUTION WITHOUT DIRECTION LEADS TO STASIS AND IRRELEVANCE.

Solution:

Take time out of the business. Explore the bigger picture.  What are the trends? The important timelines? What are the threats? The opportunities? How will you evolve a roadmap to communicate and guide the development of the capabilities you are going to need?

Go offsite. Find a place that will inspire imaginative thinking and courageous conversations. Hire an external facilitator. One that will guide you through a structured process. One that will call you out when your thinking gets narrow, biased, or sloppy. One that will help you make sense of complexity. One that will help you converge on a way ahead.

Thank you both so much for an exceptionally powerful and enjoyable couple of days. It has very much jump started our thinking and given us confidence that what we are planning is heading in the right direction supported and bolstered by the ideas we generated with your guidance.”   James. CEO. Training & Events.

Want a strategic planning framework to kick start some big conversations? Email me on dave@freshairleadership.com or call 07776 153428.

PROBLEM #2.  YOU’RE LOSING IT!

More sales. More hires. Your business is growing. But something isn’t right.

THINGS ARE BEGINNING TO DRIFT. HIGHER COSTS. LOWER PROFITS.

You’re losing that unity of effort and common purpose you and your people had when you were smaller. And you’re spending more and more time pulling things back.

LESS AND LESS ALIGNMENT. MORE AND MORE FRICTION. LESS AND LESS BUZZ.

Solution:

You need to look at your operating system. The whole way your business hangs together. Not just your sales model.  Where do leaders and teams focus their effort? What are the predictive metrics that matter? How do you know what works? How will you evolve performance and strengthen resilience?

Find a space that will allow you and your senior team to do some focussed work on this, yet also provide for reflective interludes. An offsite venue that has out-the-door-access into great countryside is perfect. Again, hire an external facilitator to help you define your operating system and your engagement plan for communicating it.

This workshop (or series of workshops) is going to throw up a series of activities and projects that will need the personal sponsorship of senior team colleagues. A well-run workshop won’t conclude until tasks, ownership, success measures, and governance have been agreed and committed to.

“This was an eye-opening few days for us. By looking at our business as a human system and building our understanding of it up from foundational needs such as “Stay True” and “Stay Well”, and addressing others such as “Stay Relevant”, “Deliver Unforgettable” and “Stay Ambitious” we have thoroughly refreshed the way we work together, and what it means to lead this business effectively!”  Neil. Managing Director. Professional Services.

Want to know how we can help you build a better operating system? Email me on dave@freshairleadership.com or call 07776 153428.

PROBLEM #3.  SHINY SQUIRRELS!

So, you have done something about Problem #2, and you’re on the way to defining or re-tuning your operating system.  But performance is still stalling. Patchy success perhaps.  But no consistency.

LEADERS AND TEAMS AREN’T THINKING AND ACTING AS IF YOUR BUSINESS DEPENDS ON IT.

They are good people, but they are easily distracted by shiny squirrels.

EXECUTION LACKS DISCIPLINE AND RIGOUR.

Solution:

Understanding the operating system is just a first step.  People need to get beyond this and actively use it.  To learn by doing. To develop expertise. To collectively adapt and improve it. To own it.

The boring truth is that once you have a system that works, you need to keep turning the handle on it. You need to deliver on the inputs in order to get the outputs. And you need to have metrics in place to understand and optimise this relationship in the context of your strategic intentions.

SYSTEMISATION AND FOCUSSED EXECUTION. NONE OF THIS IS HIGH TECH. IT’S ABOUT LEADERSHIP AND TEAMWORK.

Who is going to do all of this? Hire an external consultant to provide critical oversight, some coaching perhaps, and who will hold you and colleagues to account. Longer term consider establishing a Chief Operating Officer role with a seat on the senior leadership team to ensure strategy and operations remain aligned.

“I am excited by the senior leadership team and I can see it growing into a very strong force. The work you have done with them to systemise our business winning and project management processes has created something that feels like a cool and compelling brand! The XXX Way! Thank you.”  Paul. Executive Chairman. Engineering and Technology.

WHAT NOW?

If you are not regularly EXPLORING the wider environment and EVOLVING ways in which to remain relevant, nor paying attention to the quality of operational EXECUTION, then you are probably NOT leading the business as effectively as you want to be.

Let’s explore how we can help you. Get in touch with me now on dave@freshairleadership.com or call 07776 153428.

Best wishes,

Dave

Dave Stewart
Founder and Chief Executive
The Fresh Air Leadership Company

We help newly appointed CEOs build highly effective leadership teams.

Based in Scotland, operating UK-wide.

Here are 3 ways in which you are unconsciously screwing your business and some thoughts around how …

Asking the right question

As a leader, being able to ask questions that get to the bottom of problems is important. Right?

Questions, and the way we phrase them, have the power to shape our lives.

Have you noticed how the kinds of questions we ask end up framing the quality of our interactions with family members, friends, and work colleagues?

Have you ever asked your partner, “how was your day?” Or a child, “how was school?”

Odds are that you received a curt, disinterested, and uninteresting reply. Maybe just a stare and a grunt!

Instead, try something like, “What was the best thing that happened today?’ Or in the words of M People, “What have you done today to make you feel proud?”

You’ll engage a quite different part of the brain and will be much more likely to fire up a conversation of surprising energy and passion. One that brings forward the positive stories that would otherwise remain untold.

Turning a negative into a positive

In business, paying attention to how we ask questions is super-important.

There’s a great story about a company that was experiencing a high rate of turnover. Fifteen percent of the workforce was leaving every two years.

The management team ran some staff engagements and found a long list of complaints and concerns. They enlisted the help of an external consultant.

On arrival the consultant asked a different question to the original one. “What is it about the company that makes 85% of employees want to stay? “

Further work uncovered hundreds of positive stories, many of which revealed factors that most of the management team had forgotten about or hadn’t even considered.

Surfacing and sharing these stories prompted a further engagement with staff to collaboratively inquire into a second big question, “How do we need to be to be right together? Right people. Right fit. Right company. Right together.”

Fixing things isn’t a bad approach but is unlikely to move your company much beyond where you were before you had problems. A sort of ‘not bad’ to ‘quite good’ transition. But tapping into what is already strong and using this as a launchpad for enhancement can be transformative and take you from ‘good’ to ‘great’.

Strengths-based questions and a tool to help you

Forming that initial strengths-based question is at the core of the super-powerful leadership philosophy and process of Appreciative (or Strengths-Based) Inquiry.

Appreciative Inquiry is a way of looking at organisational change which focuses on identifying and doing more of what is already working well, rather than looking for glitches and trying to sort them out. Strategic change is fuelled by focusing on the core strengths of an organisation and then using those strengths to reshape the future.

Next time we’ll explore this in more detail via an outdoor workshop we ran in the Scottish Highlands and give you a tool to help you run your own transformative team and staff engagements.

Can’t wait? Need help now? Then get in touch on +44 7776 153428 and dave@freshairleadership.com

Best wishes,

Dave

Dave Stewart
Founder and Managing Director
The Fresh Air Leadership Company
Email: dave@freshairleadership.com
Mobile: +44 7776 153428

The Fresh Air Leadership Company helps leaders and teams figure out who they are and what it is to lead well in their worlds. We do this by creating bespoke no-bullshit thinking and development experiences for leaders and teams in amazing Scottish spaces with exceptional and unconventional coach-facilitators.

As a leader, being able to ask questions that get to the bottom of problems is important. …

Fear of Failure. Breaking free!

Fear of failure is a pretty normal feeling for many business leaders. You know the buck stops with you, so the fear of failure is strong and tangible. You live with it. Under normal circumstances you can probably manage it okay. It fuels adrenaline that fires you up and helps you lead, it helps you make decisions in the best interest of the business, it drives you towards building a better future.

But if the fear overwhelms you, your courage can evaporate and you can feel stuck. You may be feeling it right now. You may know of others who are feeling it too.

Maybe you are worried by shifts in customers’ buying habits. Maybe your competitors seem ahead of you in reshaping their offers and their operating models.

Nothing seems certain. And with this lack of certainty comes fear.

There is the fear of doing nothing. The fear of doing a new thing. The fear of failure. It’s the same as it ever was.

Here are some thoughts from business leaders we have supported over the years on how to manage and overcome fear.

These are real life strategies which emerged from a number of outdoor Team Walkshops. They feel enduringly applicable.

Symptoms and behaviours

We discussed the way fear manifested itself in everyday life, and these are the symptoms many of the CEOs and executives reported. People were surprised to see that what they thought of as an individual and personal response to fear of failure was in fact a common experience. Reassured too, to find that they were not alone in feeling and acting in these ways:

  • Anxiety that manifested itself in worry, sleeplessness, tummy upsets etc.
  • A reluctance to try new things, low self-belief around execution, a feeling they would be “judged”.
  • Self-sabotage. Unconsciously putting obstacles in their own way. For example, being distracted by seemingly “higher priority” issues which were little more than low pay-off “good things to do”.
  • The momentum-stalling pursuit of perfectionism, of getting all ducks perfectly in a row before taking action. A behaviour which ate up time and threatened to squander competitive advantage.

All in the mind

Our discussions threw up the following useful points.

As CEOs and executives, we get to define what we mean by “failure”.  It is a mental construct which we can shape and play with.

Even if we are influenced by formative childhood experiences and traumatic events, community expectations and professional benchmarks, we are ultimately authors of our own stories.

We can therefore interpret “failure” as anything from a give-up death blow through a “market signal” to an opportunity for growth and learning. The latter is more likely if we understand what our core and enduring purpose is. Without such a rudder we are more likely to be tossed around in any storm.

Echoing this, one CEO remarked that young children are fearless and that we seem to learn fear as we grow up by being judged at home and at school. Fear is therefore like a learned response to external influences.  If we can learn to focus internally on what makes us tick – and not others’ opinions – then we can operate in a truer, unencumbered way.

The resilience and growth mindset concept of “falling forward” or “falling upwards” struck a real chord with many. One CEO suggested that the word “failure” could more positively be replaced by “delayed success”, and another framed failure as a “learning event”. 

Strategies

Here are the eight strategies CEOs and executives found effective in overcoming the fears that threatened to hold them back. Which one are you most drawn towards?  Perhaps you can use more than one to create more objectivity and courage, and less bias and fear.

#1  Get scared!

All accepted that the feelings we have around “fear” are common, rather than necessarily natural, and in most cases are positive indicators that we are stretching, growing, and learning. So, embrace the feeling as a “good thing” rather than see it as a sign to stop, shrink, or give up.

One executive suggested that if we are not at least a little bit scared then we aren’t really trying hard enough!

#2 Do the numbers

How many times do you make a decision based on intuition? You are being guided by experience (maybe?) and bias (probably).  Instead, think stuff through and write it down. Include other people. Mitigate against bias. Reflect on the potential outcomes of any move, estimate their value/cost, and assess their likelihood. For example, a high probability “fail” in a scenario could be at one chance in 10 and might cost £X. By contrast there might be a range of high probability positive outcomes returning between £5X and £10X.

#3  “What’s the worst…?”   

Related to the above, is the question “what is the worst that could happen?” Really dig into this and just see how bad it really could be. Writing it down and assessing it in the cold light of day might change your perspective. Maybe some analysis will suggest that “the worst” isn’t really that bad at all.

#4 Baby steps 

Break the big task down into more manageable chunks by taking incremental steps in the desired direction. These will create momentum without the paralysing fear of envisaging some huge leap costing loads of courage, effort, and money.

#5 Personification

Dig deep into the fear you are experiencing to find out “who” is sitting on your shoulder, whispering those negative, resolve-sapping words. Give the fear a name, make him/her small (“little Johnny”, “silly Sally” etc.) and dress him/her up in ridiculous clothes. Or maybe give the fear some space to say its piece, then put it in your pocket to shut it up.

#6 Perspective

Give the fear some tangible form (do this with your imagination, or even better use a real object) and drop it on the ground. Next, walk around it and consider it from different perspectives. At each point around the circle, look at the fear through the eyes of a different persona/stakeholder etc. This might sound a little bit woo-woo but it can work really well for some people.

#7 Planning 

Planning (on a periodic basis) will help you develop flexibility and adaptability. So, when “Plan A” falters, you already have “Plan B” etc.. up your sleeve. As Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle I have always found plans as useless, but planning is indispensable!”

#8 People 

All of the above work best when you have others to share the thinking with, and to support and challenge you. Sharing your fears with people you trust can help diminish them (the fears, not the people!). Or give you the push you need to feel the fear and do it anyway.

Now what?

You are not alone if you’re feeling stuck and unsure of your next move. I hope these ideas have been helpful. Do give some of them a go and let me know how you get on.

At the Fresh Air Leadership Company we help leaders and teams figure out who they are and what it is to lead well in their worlds. In particular we help CEOs build the collective leadership capability of their senior teams.

So please also get in touch if you need help to think your way into a new relationship with “fear” and “failure” in order to achieve what you and colleagues have set out to do.

Best wishes,

Dave Stewart

Founder and Managing Director

Email: dave@freshairleadership.com

Mobile: +44 7776 15342

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Fear of failure is a pretty normal feeling for many business leaders. You know the buck stops …

Purpose-led, values-based decision making

We come across senior teams who have not yet developed a consistent approach to making decisions.

Think about that.

Important operational and strategic decisions that are subject to the vagaries of intuition, moods, poorly understood context, a lack of relevant criteria, a failure to gather relevant qualified information, the wrong people round the table, and more.

Decision making when you’re under fire, either literally or metaphorically, isn’t easy.

It takes heightened awareness, the considered selection of an appropriate course of action, continuous review, and drive to see it through. Military and emergency services decision making processes can help you move from a place of mind-boggling complexity and danger to one of relative safety, and onwards towards delivering on your purpose.

It’s what helped me during a first 30-year career in the military. It’s helped me work through the shock of being made redundant. It’s helped me work through some shocking verbal abuse by a toxic boss. It’s helped me work through some fast-moving opportunities.

It’s the way we lead when crocodiles look like making it into the canoe! Or when an amazing opportunity materialises. It’s a good way of leading operationally and strategically as a matter of course.

I’d like to share that way with you. Let me know if this helps you too.

Fight, freeze, flee; have a cup of tea!

Fight, flight, and freeze are animal instincts triggered by your “lizard” brain. You will have noticed your own reaction to crises and the reactions of those around you.

Maybe you have gone into instinctive decision-action mode yet noticed colleagues and other stakeholders who have withdrawn and curled up, and others who have busied themselves with non-essential stuff and needed help to become more functional.

On the other side of these instinctive reactions, leaders need to access the slower firing “modern” brain in order to take in a situation, make sense of it, and chart a way forward. Think of taking a moment, having a cup of tea, and having a jolly good think and chat about what’s going on! Think of this as an opportunity to lead by asking and finding the answers to critical questions.

And if you ask questions which are linked to your values and strategic business drivers the answers will open up ways towards keeping your show on the road and achieving your purpose.

The Decision Wheel

The Decision Wheel is derived from how the military and emergency services think and act their way through everything from the immediacy of an incident to longer term planning of strategic campaigns.

It’s about how to think rather than what to think. This is critical in both senses of the word.

In practice, it is natural to find yourself circling back and forth before completing one cycle of the wheel, especially between Options and Factors & Filters. Think of it as a set of cycles within the larger cycle.

Please help yourself. It this can work for you then please put it to good use. Right now, this model works well for us.

If you’d like a chat about decision making in your business, let me know. It is central to the work we do helping chief executives build highly effective leadership teams.

Best wishes,

Dave Stewart
Chief Executive
The Fresh Air Leadership Company
dave@freshairleadership.com

Helping chief executives build highly effective leadership teams

We come across senior teams who have not yet developed a consistent approach to making decisions. Think …

Beyond tomorrow!

We want to talk to you about Resilience. But not right now.

Right now you are getting your head round this rapidly unfolding virus situation. You are fast discovering how resilient your organisation, teams, colleagues, and yourself are. You are discovering the resilient qualities of your families, communities, and wider society.

Soon you will need to think beyond tomorrow. Increasingly so as the situation begins to turn and head towards some sort of “new normal”. Because this moment WILL pass.

"And it is not just acute shock you will need to build resilience for but also the chronic, engagement-sapping ways of working you may have increasingly allowed to take root in your organisation over many years. This hiatus is an opportunity!"

How will you build better resilience into your world going forward?

First, let’s agree a definition of Resilience. For us it is “bounce-back-ability” rather than some notion of heroic, unbending, toughness.

Here are some simple models and high level commentary to prod your thinking. Not in anyway comprehensive. Just a prod. Think of these as lenses through which to look at interlocking organisational, team, and individual levels. We are not including family, community, and society here, massively important as they are.

Organisation:

We all have blind spots and preferences, and a simple model such as the McKinsey 7S invites you to pay attention to the interconnected elements that make up an organisational system. Where are you strong, where are you weak, what have you forgotten about?

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Most of these “S” are self explanatory, except perhaps for Style. Think of this as including behaviours, leadership, and brand. Note that when the system is out of balance or alignment that the pressure is often felt by the Staff at the “bottom” of the model. Staff “issues” can therefore be symptoms that need wider investigation. The answer isn’t always leadership or a bit of transactional HR.

Incidentally this is why loads of blogs, books, and apps about personal resilience won’t give you a resilient organisation, resilient teams, or even resilient individuals! If, as a leader, you don’t take a systems view of Resilience you are on a hiding to nothing!

For more on McKinsey 7S see here https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/enduring-ideas-the-7-s-framework

Team:

Two models here.

First is a 2 x 2 derived from the IOD’s Governance Model. Many leaders we consult and coach discover they are spending too much of their time over-managing in the bottom left quadrant, and not enough time imagining a future, shaping it, engaging stakeholders, and building the capability to make it real. They are mostly managing and not really leading.

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The second model is derived from Patrick Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”. You need to read the model from the bottom upwards. If there isn’t enough trust in the room your team won’t be able to get to grips with tough topics, be challengingly creative, and commit to difficult decisions. A disengaged, topic-dodging team is no good, particularly when facing chronic situations.

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Individual:

Three models here.

Karen Reivich highlights 7 learnable skills and attributes that will help build individual resilience. Development in just a few of these will make a difference. The task is not necessarily to be skilled in all seven areas, but why not go for as many as you can!?

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Carol Dweck’s “Growth Mindset” echoes a number of Karen Reivich’s 7 Learnable Resilience skills/attributes. Coaching can help people with “fixed mindsets” develop more of a growth outlook and cope with acute and chronic challenges more effectively.

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Finally, this simple “PAD” model is derived from the struggles and ultimate Olympic achievements of Ben Hunt-Davis and the GB rowing 8s. It is a self-explanatory way of turning shit into gold!

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So what? Now what?

There you are. A quick thinking prod using some quite well known models. You will have your favourites that work well for you. Share them.

"To reiterate what we said at the start, individual resilience is super-important but it is a leadership cop-out if you aren’t designing resilience into your organisational system and how your teams work together."
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Get in touch when things are turning round for you. We will help you make sense of your recent experience and help you build better Resilience into your business.

Dave Stewart

Founder & Managing Director

The Fresh Air Leadership Company

+44 7776 153428

dave@freshairleadership.com

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