Leaders are Human Beings too
Leading and Managing people during times of change is very different from doing so in stable times. The challenge is a “quadruple-whammy”. Leadership is easy in theory: Show the direction. Provide protection. Create order. Listen. Show empathy. Be supportive. etc. In practice, it is a different story:
Leading others through change, showing them the way and helping them cope with the challenges, uncertainty and fears that the current context provide is a great challenge in itself.
Then, Leaders are human beings too, going through their own transition and change, where the leadership role is evolving and where the leader face the same challenges that the employees do.
These two parallel challenges are compounded with extensive workloads and operational challenges, allowing for very little time to resource and develop the leadership skills, and taking the necessary time to process change.
And last by not least, we all bring in a mental and emotional charge to work, beyond what is going on in the organization. Climate anxiety, Covid 19 turmoil, war, geo political instability, social media unrest creates situations and cases at work that traditional leadership and management approaches do not bring answers to.
Why should anyone want to be led by you? What kind of leader do you want to be?
A practical stance to leadership
Crisis and challenges bring opportunities. The potential to add value as a leader in todays organization is enormous, and value can be created in many different ways. A deliberate choice to take as a leader is what kind of role to take up. In our client engagements, we consciously switch between the role of the consultant, that helps find solutions, to the role of the coach, that enables others to find their own solutions, to the leader that shows the ways and sets examples, to the manager that organizes and structures things to make it all work.
We help clients to materialize what leadership and management means in different contexts: Inside transformation programs, outside transformation programs, managing people and teams in transition, adopting new ways of working, dealing with challenges, problems, and conflicts, and in many other scenarios of organisational change and business transformation.
We draw on a wide range of our capabilities to facilitate this work, where our understanding of role evolution and organisational dynamics provide a central framework for equipping leaders with the right skills, mind-set and capabilities to lead and manage during the times of change.
Risks
When the leadership and management practices are not adequate relative to the situation, trust drops, employees adopt a passive stance to work, waiting for others to take initiative, and dis-engage little by little.
Benefits
Re-thinking leadership and management is not about becoming a super-hero that solves all problems for everyone. It is about creating the right conditions for others to take on and tackle the challenges themselves, together. This injects energy at scale in the organisation, as employees are set free to move forward and make progress.
How we help
We transfer our knowledge and experience of new perspective on leadership, explicitly through defined mandates and projects for leadership development, and implicitly through any consulting and coaching engagement. What we do is supported by a wide range of academically and scientifically validated tools and methods, as well as field tested management and leadership practices.
Learn More
Send us a message – Schedule a meeting
Our Services
Read more about how we engage with our clients here
