The Agile Business Innovation‘s Podcast

Leadership Coaching: Sequences and pattern interruption

I want to focus on sequences now. What is it that we mean by sequences? I mean a pattern of behaviour, of thinking or feeling that leads to a known outcome. So it's kind of like going: “dat da de dat da...” and someone else goes: “dat da!” That's a sequence and it's so inbred that you do it automatically.

Leadership Coaching: The Hero’s Journey

We've spoken about my interest in silences, stories and sequences. I want to go deeper into that theme of storytelling. One of the things I use to help leaders understand their story is the hero's journey.

Leadership Coaching: Story telling

Many of the leaders I've talked to have a lot of stories.

They tell me about what happened, what they want, what they went through, war stories about their leadership usually with them in the role of the hero having conquered the world, and sometimes with them in the role of the victim having suffered.

Leadership Coaching: Silence is a signal

One of the things I love doing is coaching leaders and leadership teams. They are key in this road to innovation. I've been coaching leaders for about 33 years now and lately I've been thinking “What is it that I actually do”.

Apart from all the theories and models I've heard and learned I realized I concentrate on three things:

1. silences

2. stories

3. sequences

 

Let's take silences first.

Leadership: Leaders need members – optimizing versus maximising

One of my particular topics is leadership. Leadership in all sorts of forms and all sorts of variations. One of the things that I really think about is leadership as a relationship, because we talk a lot about leadership as a position. What does it mean if you take a certain rank within an organization? But at a much deeper level, leadership is also a relationship between leaders and followers, or leaders and members.

Leadership: Taking accountability as a leader

I'm a business consultant and I specialize in business innovation. My tagline is I help you innovate your business as quickly as you innovate your products.

I often meet businesses where they innovate their products much more quickly than they innovate their business, and that means they stagnate. They're not on time for markets. Their leadership is old-fashioned. Their corporation is siloed. The commercial function and the innovation function don't work together. And I help businesses fix that.

Leadership: Differentiating the levels to avoid confusion in roles

I want to tell you a story about incisiveness.

I was called some time ago to coach a startup team. And it's a brilliant startup. It was started by three brothers. The three brothers had a fantastic idea of a high-tech business that could conquer the world. One of them was operational. One of them was technical. And the other was a more general manager profile. They did really well. They tried out the first product, decided that hardware wasn't really where the margins were, jumped on the software wagon, and have now got a product which they launched in partnership with a Chinese hardware business.

Leadership: No Exceptions - Clarifying The Formal Leadership Structure

Today, I'd like to talk about leadership, because leadership is a concern not only in organizations, but in the world today. The first thing I want to say about leadership is the importance of clarity of structure.

So, one day I was speaking at a conference and the grandson of the owner of a business comes up to me. And he says, "Hey, I love the way you spoke. Would you be willing to come to us?" So, he flew me out. He chauffeured me to a very expensive restaurant and started telling me about the various incidents they had as leaders within their family business.

Leadership: The unconscious landscape of leadership

One of my specialities is thinking about leadership. And today, I want to talk to you about leadership in the world today. It's a particular concern of mine. Now, we see the rise of different types of leaderships in different countries and the tension that causes in the world today.

One of my favourite books as I was growing up was The Hobbit, or more particularly the Lord of the Rings. When I was a little girl, what fascinated me was this band of people going out, diverse people going out on a quest against all odds and bonding with each other, despite their very human tendencies to be selfish or to be angry or to be jealous of different relationships.

Cooperation in teams: Contracting Level 3: Psychological Contract

The thing we're talking about today is contracting. We've already talked about level one of contracting, "How do you make good administrative contract, which structures your relationship?" The second level is, "How do you make a good professional contract, which has to do with what problem definition, what goals are we going for and how are we going to work together to achieve those goals?"

Contracting Level 3: Psychological Contract The third level of contracting is called the psychological level of the contract. And that's a little bit trickier because it's actually the unconscious part of the contracting process. At this level, we look at, "Yeah, okay, so we've got a structure for the contract and we've got a method, how are we going to work together?" But at this level, we really are thinking about, "Why me and why now? So what implicit needs are you trying to get met through this contract and what implicit needs do I have?"