|
A stereotype of leaders sees them as in a solitary role. The reality more often means a leader shares that role, whether collaborating on a time-limited project or in an ongoing position. Sharing leadership demands emotional intelligence. Leaders who are strong in several of these six emotional intelligence competencies will be more effective when leading collaboratively.
Emotional Self-Awareness
Being aware of your own emotions and how they impact your actions offers a strong platform for leading yourself. And in shared leadership such self-awareness allows you to recognize how your colleagues’ actions impact you.
Emotional Self-Control
Once you’re aware of your emotions, you can better manage what you do with them. Self-control allows you to pause before responding. Self-control helps you choose whether or how to express those feelings with skill.
Adaptability
When you’re sharing leadership, it helps to be able to adapt to styles and strategies that may be different from what you would do if you were leading on your own. Adaptability means that you can remain focused on the goal while remaining flexible in what tactics you use to achieve that goal.
Empathy
While self-awareness allows you to understand your own feelings, empathy shines a light on your co-leaders’ perspective. So often, in shared leadership situations we have to coordinate with someone we don’t know well. Empathy allows you to understand your co-leaders’ feelings and how their background impacts their perspective.
Organizational Awareness
Leaders always need to recognize the big picture of their organization and its culture and power relationships, as well as what’s going on between its parts. Shared leadership situations, especially those that cross organization or division boundaries, require that the leaders understand the dynamics within and between each organization or division.
Conflict Management
Conflict is a given in all work settings and seems inevitable when two or more people share leadership. To be effective in their collaboration, leaders need be skilled at acknowledging and understanding different perspectives, and capable of finding common ground.
What collaborative leadership situations are on your horizon? Reflecting on your skills with these strategies and EI competencies and working to strengthen them can help.
|
I have been talking about the concept of VUCA for some time now. It’s an acronym developed by the U.S. military after the collapse of the Soviet Union to describe a multipolar world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Volatility reflects the speed and turbulence of change. Uncertainty means that outcomes, even from familiar actions, are less predictable. Complexity indicates the vastness of interdependencies in globally connected economies and societies. And ambiguity conveys the multitude of options and potential outcomes resulting from them.
Although the leadership challenges in an increasingly VUCA world are significant, they’re not insurmountable for those who are willing to look beyond old thinking and approaches. Here’s some pragmatic guidance to help you craft a strategy:
VUCA doesn’t mean that everything is unpredictable. If you step back to take a system-level view of the world, there are meta-phenomena with trend lines that are clear if not precisely delineated:
· Urban concentrations: The majority of the globe’s population now lives in cities and this will continue to increase in the decades ahead. By mid-century, most of the top 10 mega-cities in the world will be in the developing world. With urbanization generally come longer life expectancies, lower birth rates, and greater economic prospects.
· Climate changes: While debate continues over the exact timing and consequences, the consensus that we are indeed in the Anthropocene era, in which human activity is altering the climate is only strengthening. Sea levels will rise, extreme weather events will multiply, and water sources and agricultural production will be less reliable.
· Demographic shifts: Globally, the North and West are getting older, and the greatest concentrations of youth will be in the South and East. Tensions are likely to rise as the bulk of economic wealth and opportunity remain beyond the reach of many people.
· Technology advances: Although progress may deviate from Moore’s Law, we will be ever-more connected by devices that are smaller, faster, and less expensive. Each of these phenomena can be used as a lens on your business and industry to make it easier to discern what may be coming.
Get curious, and get out of your comfort zone. VUCA is a condition that calls for questions — lots of them. Penetrating questions that ferret out nuance. Challenging questions that stimulate differing views and debate. Open-ended questions that fuel imagination. Analytical questions that distinguish what you think from what you know. Continually asking questions will help you see patterns and make more accurate predictions. As a leader, you must encourage open, direct feedback as well as ideas that challenge the status quo.
Create an island of certainty amid VUCA turbulence. Constant change can set people on edge because we humans crave certainty. People worry about their jobs, status, and influence. This can hurt engagement, productivity, and the willingness to act independently. But you can reassure your team through stability and transparency of process.
VUCA isn’t something to be solved; it simply is. Attempts to simplify complexity, or to break volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity down into smaller and smaller parts in hopes that each can be decoded and countered will not make them go away — there are too many elements beyond the control of traditional centers of power and authority. Leaders, attend to how your organizations respond to issues of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, because the world is getting more and more VUCA every single day.
|
This is the blog that Tanmay Vora is summarizing in the summarized article:
Talking about the impending shifts like automation, robotics, disruptions and uncertainties in our world of work is almost clichéd. What seems like a problem is also an opportunity to do the thing that makes us human – to change our attitudes and fixed beliefs about how we have traditionally experienced work. It is this shift in how we see the world around us that truly enables us to deal with it constructively.
In this context, I read an excellent post by Kenneth Mikkelsen titled “Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes” at Drucker Forum blog. The post outlines four shifts leaders must focus on to deal with slides and shifts around us. Here is a sketch note version of ideas presented in the post.
No comments:
Post a Comment