We cover much ground in this episode of the Entrusted to Lead Podcast, hosted by Danita Cummins. Below is a bit of elaboration on some of the key points we covered.
We started with an often underemphasized but absolutely crucial part of leadership—understanding that we have leaders to mobilize and focus the efforts and energy in the organization to maximize the desired outcomes. This purpose of having leaders requires that the leader build an approach to translating the performance intentions from the operating model and the strategy into tangible desired outcomes of leadership.
The Contextual Leader provides an approach for leaders to interpret their particular organizational intentions that should guide their leadership efforts. Based on work performance research, the book draws a clear line to the most critical performance behaviours. These links leave the leader with a very clear leadership foundation, allowing her to express and align role requirements with her teams and employees – one of the linchpins in making people perform above and beyond their roles.
Danita Cummins, host of the Entrusted to Lead Podcast, and I spoke about how to lead effectively in different contexts by combining the opening-closing and the directing-sharing leadership approaches. These are the matching practices in contextual leadership, and the two dimensions make navigating the complexities of context very tangible. The other side of effective contextual leadership is actively shaping the context to deliver the performance behaviours that best deliver on the organizational intentions. As part of this discussion, we touched upon how some approaches to cross-cultural collaboration do not work well in a multicultural setting and how to approach it instead. The more viable approach is about creating strong common ground that people are involved in interpreting into OK and not OK behaviour. This way, you shape shared beliefs through shared language, mutual expectations, and accountability for these commitments. This approach places the leader as a very active agent in optimizing the context in addition to the person-to-person leadership efforts.
From the outside angle of contextual leadership, we talked about effective organizational responses to factors like Dynamism (things changing fast in the outside business environment in hard-to-predict patterns), Complexity (many elements to keep an eye on while at the same time difficult for us to get relevant information on them) or Risk Intensity (the presence of risks with high probability of turning into incidents with harmful consequences). These external factors can be mitigated by setting your organization up for it by deliberately shaping structures, cultures and staffing. By the way, it is on purpose that I talk about cultures in plural because twelve subcultures provide building blocks in developing a fit-for-purpose company culture.
Besides the points above, we also touched on how the tendency in leadership literature to oversimplify one-size-fits-all methods is a challenge. Instead, leaders must embrace complexity to arrive at simplicity and focus as essential elements in effective leadership. Finally, we also spoke about the leadership piano, why I did the research behind the book and how reading the first 75 pages of the book equips you to use the remaining 500 pages as a handbook where you concentrate on the few crucial factors in your context that truly helps or hinders performance and engagement – happy listening.
