What’s the deal with psychological safety?

Psychological safety has been described as the most important factor in enabling high performing teams. I am joined by Dr. Amy Edmondson from Harvard and Kieran White to discuss:

  • What is psychological safety and why is it important,
  • The overlaps with trust and other dimensions,
  • How does it facilitate teaming,
  • What is structural dynamics and how can we apply that idea to our own team,

And a whole lot more!

Fear is the Enemy of Flourishing: Why Psychological Safety is needed now more than ever.

What I learned from my podcast with Amy Edmondson and Kieran White 

Read the article

Fear is the Enemy of Flourishing: Why Psychological Safety is needed now more than ever.

What I learned from my podcast with Amy Edmondson and Kieran White

“I understand that I need to find my voice and speak up more in leadership team meetings but I know there have been repercussions in the past for people who have done that, so I am unsure it is worth the risk”.

This was the commentary from more than one member of a leadership team that we have been working with. Each member had the opportunity to explore their leadership effectiveness with their coach and determine how they could leverage that to enhance their performance and enable the achievement of the organisation’s strategic objectives.

These are mature, experienced executives, stewarding an organisation and doing important work. Yet, they felt unable to make their full contribution as the environment did not feel safe for them to make their maximum contribution. The result is suboptimal outcomes and frustration not just for them but for the entire organisation.

“Fear is the enemy of flourishing.”

Fear is the enemy of flourishing. Organisations are incredibly active in creating physically safe environments. The implications of a physical accident or injury are tangible and obvious. You can’t pretend it isn’t there or didn’t happen. Less tangible but no less real is the need to create a psychologically safe environment. Creating a situation where there is no fear enables people to flourish. To make this happen, people need to not be inhibited by interpersonal fear. This is creating a psychologically safe environment.

It is grounded in the 1965 work of Warren Bennis and Edgar Schein. It came to the fore as a result of the work done at Google where it was found that the most important factor contributing to productivity was psychological safety.

I was curious to understand more about it so I spoke with the international thought leader in this area, Amy Edmondson for my podcast, The Leadership Diet.  Amy is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and her most current book is The Fearless Organisation: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for learning, innovation, and growth In the podcast, I talked with Amy and her colleague Kieran White of People Talking.

While the term is becoming increasingly familiar, I sense there is a degree of confusion about the concept of psychological safety and how its power can be harnessed. This is increasingly important in the context of the pandemic as we navigate through the uncertainty and flux. Here are some key points.

What is psychological safety?

“Psychological safety is an expectation that you can speak up at work. It is a sense you can be yourself”
Amy Edmondson

At a basic level, human beings are social creatures and have a desire for acceptance. As a result, we may be reluctant to show ourselves and stand out from the crowd as we don’t want to rock the boat and risk rejection or to look dumb in front of the group. At work, this can be amplified where the risks and consequences include employment security, advancement, and reward implications.

The ability to feel safe to be able to speak up / ask a question / admit a mistake is not a personality trait, it is an environmental construct. It needs to be enabled by processes and practices not just reliant on whether someone is wired the right way to make it happen.

The Psychologically Safe environment is a climate that allows:

  • Candor
  • Being OK to disagree
  • Productive conflict to enable learning
  • Giving the immediate “benefit of the doubt”
  • Everyone to benefit

What are the core skills required to enable psychological safety?

  • Self-awareness is always the starting point. Being aware of your habits, biases and, preferences and working constantly on self-improvement. Have a growth mindset.
  • Candor. Provide and be open to transparency about issues and situations. Be kind and courageous to hear and do the difficult things. Hold yourself and others to account. Participate in positive conflict. Make failure safe.
  • Listening. Practice humble listening – seek to understand, use multiple lenses to view situations, seek contrary views, suspend judgment.
  • Intention – employ and promote the intention to create this safe space. Role model and coach others. Give the benefit of the doubt. Care for others.

“The Cost of Silence” AKA “Why it matters”

People in the workplace will hold back if not comfortable. If your primary focus is keeping yourself safe, you are not going to have much cognitive capacity to engage in robust and challenging debates. In a physically unsafe environment, this culminates in physical injury, in a psychologically unsafe environment it is the opportunity cost where the best of people are not being harnessed. Everything is being done at a suboptimal level. In Amy’s work, this is referred to as “the cost of silence”. At its worst, it creates avoidable failure when people don’t speak up and the consequences can be disastrous e.g. the VW emissions scandal or the Challenger disaster.

Why is it more important now? The Covid Context

The shift is to knowledge work. Rather than discrete individual effort, much of this is team-based where effectiveness relies not on the collective. Technology has enabled the globalisation of workplaces where teams are not necessarily geographically co-located and as a result are remote, disparate, and diverse. As a result, we are working with a broader range of people, in different ways and from different backgrounds.

This pandemic is the first time most people have had the visceral experience of the VUCA world, where everything changed and is changing from one week to the next. It has made us realise how dependant we are on each other (often through absence). It has forced a coming to terms with our behaviours and mindsets and the implications for them in operating in this unprecedented circumstance. I detail below how some instances where this will show up and how enhanced psychological safety can support and enable.

1. Hybrid workplaces

The hybrid workplace exacerbates these challenges. Our colleagues are coming in to contact with all of our lives not just what we show at work.

“The boundary between work and personal life is minimised and that will sometimes mean that we find ourselves having to talk about things that in the past would not have been appropriate to talk about. So, if we are going to navigate this thoughtfully we need to respect and care about each other to do this well.”
Amy Edmondson

2. Lack of Certainty

As human beings, we are seekers of safety and certainty. This is not new, but the events of the moment are amplifying it. Employees look to their leaders to provide them with certainty, but the reality is that leaders are unable to give it a lot of the time at this moment.

Leaders need to offer certainty where they can; admit where they can’t and give assurance that they will when things are known. Leaders need to decipher “What kind of certainty can I give? What kind of certainty are people looking for that I can’t give? And how can I tell the difference?”

What is apparent is the need for us to develop a mindset that is comfortable with not knowing. This is difficult. Avoiding the conversation in an attempt to avoid the discomfort and trying to “stay safe” is not the right way to go. This is where it is vital to have a psychologically safe workplace so that all the concerns can be aired, and the realities and opportunities can be explored to deliver a positive outcome.

3. Collective Intelligence

Where we cannot have certainty and it is clear that we are unable to do it alone, we have to do it together. Historically, too much focus has been on individuals working on their own to solve challenges. The pandemic has shown this is an outdated model.

If we are only using the “old” ways we are not creating the space to include others and as a result, will be frustrated in our efforts to solve problems well in the new world. We will only get what we have always got and that is not enough anymore. Leaders who are only relying on what they have always done, with only those they have always done it with will be found wanting.

What is needed is a paradigm shift to the collective. Of course, there is individual accountability, but the required shift is to make space for the “we” to be most effective rather than the “I”.

The key is to harness collective intelligence. It allows us to tap into the wisdom required to solve the most complex problems. It requires a diversity of thought and experience to enable the best outcomes. This releases resources and is this environment where we are challenged to do more with less or at best, to make the best of what we’ve got, having a psychologically safe environment creates a space where potentially under or un-utilised resources can be released and realised.

“Teaming is a contact sport.
If we want diversity to be an expansion of the system rather than a contraction, we need to realise we are going to bump into one another. It releases resources when we are doing it well.”
Kieran White

Myth Busting about Psychological Safety

So, the need to create a psychologically safe environment is clear. But there are some misconceptions surrounding it. Here we bust some of the myths.

  • It’s just another term for trust

Trust refers to our expectations about another (whether that be a person or an organisation) on whether they will deliver on their promise. In comparison, Psychological Safety describes a climate – the emergent property of a group – rather than our perception of another.

  • It’s about being nice

 “Psychological safety is not just about being nice or comfortable it is about candor and enabling constructive conflict”.
Amy Edmondson

Psychological safety is far more than being nice. Being nice puts a pause on conversations and does not address the issues. Being ‘nice” just drives the issues underground, leads to frustration, and can even be a form of cowardice.

While it is not the same, a closer comparator is “kindness”. To be kind often requires courage. Being kind can mean calling out or raising what is not going well, what could be done better, or is what is not in the best interest. It is closely linked to respect, which manifests in the workplace, where when we trust each other “enough”, we can work constructively on achieving our goals and outcomes.

A principle Tennent in psychological safety is granting others the ‘Benefit of the Doubt” as a starting point. We generously give this to ourselves, creating an environment of psychological safety demands that we afford others the same courtesy.

  • It’s soft on performance

In a climate of psychological safety “We care deeply and challenge directly.”
Kieran White

Psychological safety is an enabler of performance, not a free pass. In a performance culture, there are 2 sides of the one coin. One side has psychological safety (the ability to speak up without fear of negative repercussion) and accountability and discipline on the other. Both are necessary and are a powerful enabling force for a team to work together in service of the collective.

  • I’m not a leader, it’s not up to me

There is a distinction between leadership and the titled position of being a leader. While the role of the leader is undeniable, Amy encourages us to stay away from the trap of victimhood, of waiting for someone else to create the space of psychological safety. Anyone can exercise leadership. You do not have to be a titled leader. The mere gesture of asking a sincere question of a colleague is giving them a voice, it is a small invitation to speak up. This is something everyone can do to foster a psychologically safe environment.

In our challenging world, having an environment where people feel comfortable to be themselves, and are able to utilise the full potential of their intellect and experience seems absolutely sensible. Yet, this is the opportunity many teams and organisations are missing including the Executive team mentioned at the beginning of this article.

The potential is there – are you open to making it happen?

Download this article as a PDF

Download

Season 3 Opener!

Welcome back to season 3!

And what a season we have in store.

Tune in to this teaser episode to find out more.

Bonus episode #2! How to develop great leadership teams

This is the second bonus episode – in between seasons 2 and 3 –  where I am joined by colleagues from The Leadership Context, a boutique consulting firm that I co-founded with several friends and Partners.

Today, Carole Field, Greg Lourey, Allan Tillack and I, have a deep dive into how we partner with leadership teams (top teams) to help them become great teams.

It’s really hard being a leader right now

“Y’know Pod, for the first time in my CEO career I am finding being a leader really hard! The Board and market are expecting the outcomes we promised a year ago despite the market taking a hit due to retailing being shut down in many cities, and of course I understand that. Over 20% of our employees are telling us they never want to come back to the office and some have moved away from our city, meaning they won’t be able to come back in. Our company culture was built on successful collaboration, so what does that mean going forward? Many of our team are feeling very frazzled with WFM, home schooling and all that covid has brought us. There is a jobs boom going on in our sector which is becoming quite mercenary in poaching people from company to company! And I am expected to know all the answers, to give certainty when politicians cannot, to offer hope where the media are only calling out doom and take care of all our people. It is really hard being a leader right now!”

So said one very experienced CEO level leader to me today.

I hear you! In the last week alone, I have had four conversations that have sounded like that one. And I agree, right now it is hard being a leader. No denying that. I suspect it will be hard for a while longer! In the last year I have noticed an increasing pressure on leaders to be all things to all their people all the time. And to take all the blame (read accountability) because their role is responsible all the time. Clearly this is not sustainable nor even reasonable.

But we picked you for the leadership role because you were the right person for the role. Without good leadership we would have chaos, certainly more than we currently do! Leadership, in my view, has a sense of nobility about it. So, thank you for leading. We need you to lead.

I don’t claim to have the panacea to solve for this. It is a particularly hard time to be a leader. Here are five ideas I am sharing in regular conversations with leaders that might help navigate these times.

1. Optimising your own health will optimise your leadership. Full stop.

Yes, many leaders and their teams are in lock down, partial lock down, hybrid working conditions or re embracing full freedoms, depending on what geography you are in. Repeated lock downs have forced many people to abandon previous useful habits, including exercise and reflection-based habits. If this has happened for you as a leader, then recreate those habits. Make that a priority, to whatever degree you can. If you are at home and need to help school younger children, this is made more difficult for sure. One leader shared with me that she ‘did a contra deal’ with her neighbour to supervise each other’s children for an hour each day to allow the other person some time to exercise. “This took extra organisation for sure, but the personal benefits showed up within days”, she says. (She is not based in Sydney where the current lock down laws prohibit this!). The physical and cognitive benefits of physical exercise are well documented. The antidote to mental stress that exercise can provide is also well known. Building (or rebuilding) in a 30 minute or more exercise session every day will go a long way to optimising you, which can only help in your leadership role. If nothing else just go for a walk. Everyone can make time for that.

“…..the starting point in this conversation is the leader to not feel they must carry everything on their shoulders. We never put ‘Godlike’, in the job description when we promoted you to that role…..!”

2. Can you find travel time in your diary - even if working from home?

One very noticeable change to senior leaders and especially CEO leader’s diaries, is the lack of international or long-distance travel. Despite the often-assumed glamour “flying in the pointy end” has, regular flying typically only brings jet lag and high frequent flyer points. But it also brings a forced cocoon of silence which enables reflection and thinking time. Many leaders have realised that they had built up useful habits while travelling or on the commute home from daily work and used that time for reflection on their overall day or the leadership impact they had throughout that day. The temptation when working in a hybrid or forced to work in a non-office environment, is the periods of time dedicated to reflection are tied to an anchor such as travel, and therefore don’t happen any longer. Yet the process itself is very useful. One leader told me he now blocks out his workday diary with appointments called “travel time’, so that no one can book in another video meeting into that slot. He then uses that to catch up on reading, listening to a podcast episode or for self-reflection on his leadership.

3. Where are you spending your time?

We are in a very unusual global moment in time and this time too will pass. We have already seen changes in many parts of the US and UK as cities start to open, notwithstanding that no country is immune to potential changes with this pandemic. But I am noticing many leaders are getting stuck by continuing dealing with the immediate and urgent and forgetting to get ready for what’s after the current point in time. Check your diaries.

How much time is spent in the immediate/urgent, versus the normal BAU business versus directing the business to future horizons? One leadership team I work with re organised themselves into three ‘task forces’ which sat over their functional roles. Those three areas were a Crisis Team, a BAU Team and a “Direct the Future” Team. It allows them to lead all aspects of the business, trust each other to contribute to their own ‘task force’ and to minimise each leader becoming consumed with trying to do everything. In a sector that remains in complete lock down, this action has given all the senior leaders breathing space and comfort knowing that the role of leadership was distributed.

4. Give certainty where you can, followed by hope with a dash of clarity.

One of the human lessons we are all learning in this global experiment is how random life is and how little control we really have. We are living out the VUCA acronym that was bandied about for so many years. We are also learning as leaders that we are expected to know a whole lot more answers that we possibly can. Our teams want certainty, clarity, hope and they want it now. Our media are not helping by blaming political leaders for their lack of clarity on potential freedom days and life returning to normal. The reality is life is not returning to what we understood it to be, at least not fully.

So, what can you do? Giving as much certainty, hope and points of clarity are the areas in need by most people. One CEO we worked with found her organisation appreciated enormously when she was able to say,

“Here is what we know for sure and therefore here is what we are going to do. We don’t know X and X but we are working off these assumptions until we find out more. Based on those assumptions we will proceed with XX and XX. We hope that YY will happen, of course, and we will celebrate if / when that occurs. But for absolute clarity here is our current plan and the expectations of you / us in that plan.”

5. What is the role of followership?

My increasing concern for leadership is that we are putting all responsibility and accountability into the role of leader. We have opened the doors to multi way conversations between leaders and the organisations, quite rightly. We encourage feedback for leaders for them to understand the impact they have, quite rightly. Leaders host many communication events to ensure the organisation at wide is kept up to date, again quite rightly so. But society at large is moving to a place where anyone can throw stones (metaphorically of course) at leaders from any position or platform the like, for any mistake the leader is deemed to have made. ‘Gotcha type’ journalism is designed to blame and hang out to dry leaders, particularly leaders of political persuasions, on a daily basis, or so it seems. We are become an unforgiving bunch, us humans!

Leaders are not in a vacuum. The leadership system in any organisation has multiple players including followers. Followership is not a passive act, certainly not anymore.

In the current environment the starting point in this conversation is the leader to not feel they must carry everything on their shoulders. We never put ‘Godlike’, in the job description when we promoted you to that role! Take that mantle off, it is not helping you. The next step is to remind your teams that you and they are all in this together. No one has all the answers in an ever-changing pandemic induced environment. Good solutions are co-created not necessarily only leader led.

“…society at large is moving to a place where anyone can throw stones (metaphorically of course) at leaders from any position or platform the like, for any mistake the leader is deemed to have made…”

It’s really hard being a leader right now




    How to ensure executive development is not a waste of time and money

    “My number one priority is developing leadership capability. We have invested in international executive education, run workshops, provided 360 debriefs and one-to-one coaching but don’t seem to be getting traction. Can you help?”

    This recent conversation was with the CEO of an international infrastructure business, and of course, the despair is not unusual.

    Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying something like “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome”. Sadly, this appears to be the cycle of organisations and their executive development programs.

    So why do so many companies continually invest in programs that do not deliver? A range of articles published by global strategic firm McKinsey’s and the Harvard Business Review suggest that billions of dollars are spent in the USA alone every year on leader development, and most of this is wasted.

    Our research and experience show the main reasons why programs fail to produce the desired outcomes are because they fail to address these seven key criteria:

    • Developing contextual awareness by the leaders of the organisational and market environments they are leading within, leading in one environment may be very different to other environments or contexts.
    • Clearly linking the program to the organisation’s strategic aspirations with overt clarity on why the program exists and what it is trying to achieve.
    • Focusing on shifting mindsets and developing skill sets that underpin the organisation’s identified strategic aspirations.
    • A realistic appreciation of the time required to achieve the shifts that are identified and needed.
    • Design flexibility to satisfy adult learning needs i.e. tempo and pace of the program to allow for learning to occur.
    • Linking the development initiatives to the real work of the organisation by applying behavioural experiments or capstone projects back in the workplace
    • Creating peer-based dialogue structures to enable learning transfer beyond the individual.

      In the Leadership Context, all development programs are designed to address these factors. In a recent Podcast, Padraig O’Sullivan, Greg Lourey, Carole Field and Allan Tillack came together to discuss these principles, our approaches, and why there are important.

    1. Swim in the context

    Contextual awareness is the most critical construct to understand and utilise. Leaders often assume because they were successful in one environment they will be in another environment.

    Alternatively, the way they solved problems in one environment can be transferred to the current organisation or situation. Understanding context means paying attention to the organisation itself, in terms of its lifecycle, its culture, way of making decisions, structures, whether it is part of larger organisations such as a country affiliate and they are just internal contextual questions! External contexts include market dynamics, competitor shifts, political environments and a whole raft of macro conditions that might impact the organisation.

    When thinking about designing a leadership development initiative, It is imperative to take time to “swim in the context” to develop an understanding of the realities of the circumstances in which the team operates in so the development strategies can be relevant and enabling. One organisation was referred to us through industry contact. They approached us to design a program “just like our friends in XX organisation have”, they said. “They seem to love what you have done for them”. Yet, when we took time to understand the context of this new client, it became clear that their industry, organisational life cycle and management structures were dramatically different. Whilst it would have been easy to “roll off the shelf” a previously designed program for a new client, doing so would have not addressed their real needs.

    “We are a bridge. We notice what the CEO can’t and provide an enabling lever complementary to the other business enablers, to deliver organisation’s strategic imperatives.”

    Padraig O’Sullivan
    Partner, The Leadership Context

    2. Know the organisation’s strategic aspirations

    Any development work needs to be linked to and in service of achieving the organisation’s strategic aspirations. This will be what all the development work should “hang off”. For senior leaders in an organisation, and particularly the leadership team of the organisation, all leader and team development, in our view, should be in support of enabling a critical strategic initiative.

    Padraig O’Sullivan, one of The Leadership Context partners featured in the podcast we mentioned earlier, says, “great development programs strive to get HYPER clear on the 2-3 behaviours that, if enacted consistently and uncompromisingly would have the highest impact on achieving the strategic aspiration”. The important call out here is hyper clear on a narrow but critical set of behaviours. Developing the organisation’s capability to embed these into the organisation’s DNA may be the backbone of the development focus.

    Recently we helped one global industrial organisation get hyper clear before embarking on a multi-year development program for almost 100 of their most senior leaders, that the most critical aspect of their strategy was improving their customer centricity. Traditionally they had being very successful as a result of great engineering and product development. Competitors had caught up. Going forward they had to shift from product led focus to being customer led, which did not diminish their great talent in engineering. This clarity created a clear focus in the areas of leader development which were most important for their top 100 leaders. It is within this context that clarity on results to be delivered and the metrics to be used in the assessment of the development program is determined.

    3. What is the readiness for change, really?

    Most people don’t mind change. When you ask them how different they are from, say five years ago, everyone can point to specific areas of change that have occurred. However, we don’t necessarily like change to be done to us, or mandated on us. When a leadership development program is asking leaders to address the way they think about how they lead and behave differently in order to achieve different outcomes, not everyone is interested!

    A critical contextual element is the organisation’s readiness for change. What is the appetite to adapt to different ways and challenge the prized assumptions that become a constraint to the change There are far too many examples of well-designed and documented change management initiatives that fail. Why? They fail because the leaders said they would change, but never did, and therefore, nothing really changes. In our work we spend time identifying the influencers in the team or the organisation that can be enlisted to enable the increased engagement with the upcoming changes. These people play an enormous role in the ripple effect to their peers around them and catalyse the actions towards change.

    4. Shifting Mindsets and Skill Sets

    Knowing the context and strategic aspirations allows examination of the mindsets needed to enable their achievement. Many development programs fail to achieve sustainable change, as they do not address the shift in thinking needed. Senior leaders have to deal with increasing complexity as part of their roles. The Covid pandemic taught us the reality of a VUCA world and how it impacts all our lives and business decisions. Leaders who have the ability to take a range of perspectives, seek input from many sources tend to have the ability to think differently and address issues that have no known ready-made answers or previously tried playbooks.

    Successful development initiatives are good at helping leaders to understand how they currently think, particularly under pressure and how to build perspective-taking capacity, for future scenarios.

    “Mind shift changes start with self-awareness and the ability to have perspective about the impact (intentional or otherwise) of actions. Just building the ability to “do” things differently is not enough. Programs need to build the ability and flexibility to ‘think’ differently”

    Greg Lourey
    Partner, The Leadership Context

    5. Are we there yet?

    Individual behaviours don’t change quickly so there is no reason to expect fast, sustainable change can be achieved quickly at a collective level. The shifts needed in skill and mindset to enable strategic capability lift cannot be achieved in a 3-day program.

    It will take 6, 9, 12, or 18 months. This doesn’t mean that the formal elements of a program will be for this length of time but that the program is not an “event” it is an integrative experience to pace the learning, development, and integration for sustainable change. So, if the organisation’s strategy is worth implementing, then it follows that the capability shift needed to achieve it also has to be worth implementing. This means taking time to do it properly. This is a challenging concept for many organisations to accept. This is a necessary shift in their mindset.

    “If you are not willing to accept and invest in the time it will take to develop the capability, are you prepared to tolerate the impact of ineffective leadership in the short term?”

    Carole Field
    Partner, The Leadership Context

    6. Design to enable deep learning and flexibility for each person

    • Meeting participants where they are at individual level and supporting their development to their needs rather than as a sheep dip.

    • Utilising a blended approach – theory, semantic learning, playful learning, strategic execution, teaming, peer and individual work – that come together to allow people to try new or different things or remember what they may have done at other times, providing opportunities to experiment, learn, try, learn and then repeat.

    • Experimentation – making space in the program between modules to allow time to experiment in the application of learning is critical, particularly during times of complexity i.e. Covid.

    • Real-based reflection – building the mind set and skill set to increase self-awareness. Keeping it relevant with “on-the-job” based reflection with the real team and on real issues. Implementing the discipline to explore what worked? What did not? Who can I get feedback from? And how to scaffold the learning so it is not lost and can be shared with others.Applying the pressure to ensure learning – through Cross-functional projects, ideas can be used to bring the learning together in an applied way so that the learning moves from being an academic endeavor to one that is amplifying and enabling the strategy.

    • Tempo – this is not about speed but about enabling focus to maximise learning- people learn in different ways – how to modulate different tempos to enable effective learning.

     “Taking time to experiment back on the job with real teams and colleagues in the realities of our work world is vital to embed new learning. That takes time, but it is time well spent”

    Allan Tillack
    Partner, The Leadership Context

    Organisation Learning Captured Within Peer Group Structures

    A lot of executive development investment and growth sits within an individual. While this is great for them and the impact they can individually have, the organisation does not always retain or exploit that learning to build the collective capability. This risk can be mitigated through structures like peer groups (5-7 people) experimenting and sharing their learning. The imperative is to develop thinking as a collective, not group thinking. Developing the approach of thinking broadly and deeply about “Who am   I connected with? Who else needs to be in this? An unexpected by-product is co-creating a shared mindset amongst peers.

    Comments on the Current Context

    The circumstances we operate in are constantly changing. Taking the impact of Covid as an example. It has demanded organisations respond to unforeseen circumstances and challenges. It has demanded adaption, innovation, and the ability to pivot to deliver in ambiguous and emotional times. A heightened focus on purpose and meaning, giving trust and being trustworthy and along with the need for resilience. There has been a “humanising” on many levels where people have needed to be vulnerable and open about the realities of their personal worlds and the challenges and opportunities that working from home in a lockdown situation foisted upon us.

    There has also been a general “myth-busting” around what was previously accepted as being absolutes in how to execute effective leadership and what was required to deliver outcomes. An obvious example of this is thy myth that employees are more productive in a shared office environment. This has been proven to be false. What has been needed is a shift in all players to adapt to the environment. Some have been magnificent, and others have been found wanting. As the context changes the needs and the effective responses also change. What is certain is that a static model of how to deliver as an executive is ineffective in this unpredictable and continually evolving situation.

    In our work with leaders, we observe several factors compromising their ability to effectively perform. These include experiences of overwhelm, confusion, exhaustion, and the natural human desire to return to what is known and “normality”. The impact of this is that they have a real fear of slowing down; confusion about priorities and the ability to determine what to start, stop and continue; in the rush, failing to remember and implement what has been learned and applying discipline to actions.

    It is in these times of uncertainty that the certainty that strong leaders can provide is more critical than ever.

    How to ensure executive development is not a waste of time and money




      BONUS episode! How to ensure your leadership development program works

      I am joined by colleagues from The Leadership Context, a boutique consulting firm that I have co-founded with several friends and Partners. Today, Carole Field, Greg Lourey, Allan Tillack and I take a deep dive into the reasons why leadership development programs fail. And they do fail, on a spectacular level!

      We talk about the principles of:

      • Swimming in the context to ensure we are addressing the right areas,
      • Aligning the program to specific parts of the organisational strategy,
      • Getting hyper-clear on a small number of objectives,
      • Aiming for learning depth,
      • Structuring groups to learn together which mitigates against losing the benefits when individuals leave the organisation,
      • and myth busting mirrors!