01
How bold branding shows your leadership programme means business
Successful leadership development programmes set high expectations – then live up to them. Mike Straw explores how the success (or failure) of leadership programmes can often be traced right back to the initial design and communication work, and looks at how bold branding and brave promises can lead to greater buy-in and more powerful delivery.
What do you want your leadership programme to do? Merely upskill your people, or create a cultural and leadership movement that generates tangible business results? Most L&D buyers we work with start off asking for the former, then realise they need the latter.
Creating a movement requires boldness. It requires brave promises and senior buyin. Audacious commitments and strong branding is a major part of this equation –particularly at the outset.
Cutting through the cynicism and raising expectations
To build a movement, you need to generate enthusiasm right from the start. One of the most powerful ways to do this is with bold promises and commitments. You have to say to the leaders being enrolled: this programme will transform the business; we are designing the most impactful leadership programme you’ve ever been on –
that is what we are aiming for!
It can be daunting to make a brave, possibly audacious statement like this at the start of a project. You might think, ‘are we really going to be able to live up to this’? However, you need to get people enthused and committed! Doing something extraordinary is a big test, and of course people need to up their game and find their best selves to do it. Who wouldn’t want to do that!?
Raising expectations does mean you will get a small group of people who want to shoot your promises down. But at least they’re invested, know about the programme, and have an opinion. You can work with any naysayers over the course of the programme, probing them to find out what can be done to make it even better. You’ll end up getting them on board. It’s a virtuous cycle.
Too often, L&D people create low expectations because it’s safer. And naturally, your company’s risk profile is important in deciding how bold you should go. Be brave and make a noise.
Getting senior buy-in
Of course, you can’t simply be cavalier. You also have to prove that your programme is a real business priority that will bring measurable results. That’s where your senior
leaders come in. You need a high-up figure – ideally the chief executive – to be involved in the sponsorship and often the delivery. They are your figurehead. They set the tone, the business context, the imperative, expectation and the ‘permission’ for the leaders to prioritise their development. If this is an issue then the programme may not be seen as a business imperative and delivering a ROI. Their endorsement will help build your brand and get people eager to sign up.
Investing in the branding
Branding is also key to generating a noise within the business, but something that is frequently neglected (even by those companies with fantastic external branding). Too often, these programmes get called something generic like ‘Leading the Business’. It’s no wonder that internal enthusiasm is muted. You need a name that wakes people up!
Not only does investing time on the initial branding cut through the noise and gain attention and interest, it signals to potential attendees that this is a serious programme that is being taken seriously by the business.
We work with communications and marketing teams to find and test approaches that can pique interest and cut through cynicism. Programmes we’ve worked on include the Coca-Cola European Partners ‘Accelerate Performance’ programme and the Novartis ‘Tailwind’ programme. These are brands that fit the personality of the company and spoke to attendees.
Launching your movement
So how else do you brand your programme and make some noise? With a launch event! Again, this signals that you’ve put some money and production behind the programme, and that it’s a business priority. You’ve put your money where your mouth is. Coca-Cola European Partners hired Cologne stadium for four days and got 1,200 people through the programme. Suddenly, they’d done something really big – and
created a movement. And their engagement scores shot up by 15% points. Business results followed soon after.
Interestingly, it was actually cheaper to do it this way than in 24 groups of 50 over a longer period. They’d have had to pay for more venues and travel, and for regular reiteration of programme design. Plus, they’d have got a far slower lead time to capability, which is a key measurement.
Of course, there are challenges to choreographing a big launch event. You’ve got to get all the right people there, create the right environment, and get the CEO to dedicate time to it. But there’s bound to be a lot of work involved – after all, you’re building a movement.
02
Is satisfaction really enough? How to demonstrate genuine ROI behind leadership programmes
Are you struggling to combat cynicism and get leaders to wholeheartedly and genuinely buy into your development programmes? Fresh off winning Gold for the Best Results of a Learning Programme at the Brandon Hall Excellence Awards, our CEO and founder Mike Straw explains how we’re never satisfied with customer satisfaction metrics – we’re looking to deliver real transformation.
What makes for a good leadership development programme? If you look at the measurement scores from a well-regarded scheme, you’re likely to see results such as: 86% satisfaction with the virtual classroom; 89% satisfaction with coaching; 92% satisfaction with self-learning, and my personal favourite, 98% challenges being completed (still no mention of what business impact that made).
These are absolute nonsense! Who wants to be satisfied with satisfaction? There’s no tangible result there, so why should you care? In our mind, it’s the equivalent of going on a date with someone and afterwards them saying it was a nice evening! No one wants nice, they want brilliant and excellent. You want to knock their socks off!
So shame on us as an industry. We’ve got to do better. It’s criminal to be satisfied with satisfaction.
Going down to the bottom line
Given that those are the actual results of an award-winning leadership development programme (not designed by us!), it’s no wonder that managers are reluctant to enrol when invited to do so.
Because let’s be honest. When you work with engineers or scientists or any other professional, their idea of a good time is not going on development programmes. They want to find the next medicine or the next engineering breakthrough.
So you’ve got to make the programmes practical, with an impact on the things they want to happen: reducing development times, or getting products to clinic faster for scientists.
What we’ve learned is that for our programmes to be sticky, make a difference and be sustainable, they’ve got to be wrapped around what people do in the business. And that means going down to the bottom line.
Designing leadership programmes for business results
At Achieve Breakthrough, we set about unearthing why you as an L&D buyer are actually planning this leadership development programme.
Right from the contracting stage, we’re asking: What are the business results and leadership metrics that need to shift? What change in culture do you want?
The question I always ask is: if this leadership programme were to be really successful, what would you expect to show up in the business results and KPIs? What would you want to observe in the leaders?
That’s how you ensure the programme delivers a business outcome and has an uplifting leadership capability. You look at the outcomes that are needed, and you start to work on them immediately. You prove your own hypothesis.
Connecting
programmes with business metrics
Of course, every leadership development buyer wants to show ROI. So why are they settling for customer satisfaction metrics? Why is there so much investment in leadership development programmes without much need to show ROI?
I think it’s about vendors and suppliers, and having fallen into certain habits. There’s a mistaken feeling that you can’t measure the impact of a leadership programme –and it’s become acceptable and normal not to try.
So the L&D and HR people don’t do the work to connect programmes with business metrics: they believe the story that they’re too difficult to align.
How Achieve Breakthrough tracks programmes
We put the rigour behind the programme. We track it, measure it – and promise a return on investment. Take our recent programme, for which we won gold medals for Best Results of a Learning Programme and Best Leadership Development Programme at the Brandon Hall Excellence Awards 2024, plus Best L&D Initiative – Private Sector
at the CIPD Awards 2024. Our client had problem with attrition. That meant fewer staff to give customers a great experience, and more time wasted by bosses on recruitment.
We worked from the presupposition that if people are good managers, leaders and coaches to their teams, fewer staff will want to leave. We designed a programme to embed four key leadership behaviours: Ambition, Empowerment, Courage and Accountability, aligning with our client’s core values.
The business impact speaks for itself. Compared with leaders who have not been through the programme, leaders have reduced attrition by 14% in 6 months and there has been a 25% uplift in leadership effectiveness and 15% increase in employee loyalty.
And, leaders who have completed the programme already have a 6.7% better retention rate, £6.3m in benefit and a ROI of 12:1 within a six-month period!
So far, the programme has run in 19 languages and has reached over 2,700 leaders across all business areas and functions. It’s driving long-term, sustainable and seismic cultural shift across the organisation.
03
Should we schedule more ‘pointless’ meetings?
The pandemic shattered many assumptions about how we can work and be productive. Leaders’ fears about the effectiveness of working from home were, in most cases, proven unfounded. Today, the new flexible (or even fully remote) working culture many of us enjoy means we’re more productive than ever. We rattle through tasks and attend short, sharp video calls.
But as a leader heading up a remote working team, is the lustre of productivity and the fading memory of the commute hiding what’s been lost? Rather than uniformly celebrating the minutes and hours saved by not commuting, chatting in the corridor or around the fringes of meetings, we need to be aware of the value of that ‘wasted’ time.
A little more conversation
Too much conversation for ‘action’, tightly focused on agenda points or action lists, squeezes out critical conversations for possibility. If time and latitude are not given to freeform exploratory conversations, then we could well be creating a curiosity deficit that will harm growth and innovation down the line. We can all think of instances when a brief conversation, grabbed in a lobby or as meeting guests assemble, has sparked and idea, kindled curiosity and led to an entirely new direction. It takes many sparks to light the fires of innovation that drive
transformation.
Smooth, productive, online meetings lack the rough edges where enough of those sparks can be struck. As participants log seamlessly in and out, they miss the casual banter and off-topic chat that nurtures curiosity. Dead space between remote meetings is now more often than not only snippets of time, enough time to clear a few emails.
This might well be wonderfully productive, but we’ve lost transition time. Commutes, international travel, popping out to buy lunch, moving between meeting rooms on office campuses are all great opportunities to think, randomly chat or reach out to people. Without those, we don’t just lose an opportunity for sparks of innovation, there is also less chance for people to discuss concerns or issues, and crowdsource solutions in a way that builds psychological safety.
Create some sparks
For leaders heading up teams with a high proportion of remote workers, it’s essential to model and encourage these conversations for possibility.
It’s hard, and the natural inclination may be to forge on, instil action-orientated cultures and deliver results – all of which is
important. But it’s also important to recognise that new ideas, possibilities and breakthroughs all start in conversations that need time and space to grow.
It’s important to create not only the time to think, but the spaces in which conversations for possibility can spark. Now, it’s almost impossible to schedule time to be creative, or to arrange meetings to be innovative, the human brain just does not work like that. But leaders need to dial into the needs of teams and understand where individuals derive their energy and inspiration.
For some, it could be as simple as allowing ‘off-agenda’ chat to develop at times during meetings, or deliberately adding some extra time at the start of end of a meeting. ‘Pointless’ meetings with no agenda can serve to create platforms for teams to share thoughts or ideas naturally. Others may welcome permission to spend time ‘off-task’, simply thinking and tapping into inner sources of energy and creativity.
Three steps for leaders
At a minimum, leaders should consider three approaches to cultivating conversations for possibility in online meetings:
1. Create a culture where your teams can schedule time for themselves to think. Make sure they recognise that you value the time they spend outside of meetings and delivering actions.
2. Include time for conversation in all meetings and build a culture where people feel able to bring up issues or concerns. Don’t guillotine conversations for possibility by rigidly sticking to action items and agendas.
3. Schedule the occasional ‘pointless meeting’ with no agenda and encourage people to share thoughts, ideas and even (appropriate) gossip. It is from these casual encounters that some of the best ideas arise. One team we work with calls these ‘What Space’ meetings. They have been really effective in enabling the team to raise
uncomfortable conversations and unpredictable topics.
Most importantly, leaders need to be conscious of the ideas they build and reinforce in people’s heads. If teams perceive that meetings are only for agenda and action-orientated conversation, they will close down their own curiosity and interest in thinking beyond the business as usual. This will lead not only to innovation deficits but to erosion of morale and commitment to wider visions.
Use tech consciously
Finally, a sensitivity to the limitations of technology is also required. Today’s video call and meeting technologies have made remote working a far more effective proposition. But many find it harder to interject than they would in real-life engagements, and meetings can easily become broadcasts or bilateral conversations.
It can be harder for ideas to bounce between people as they do in vibrant real-world meetings. Leaders need to take more care than ever to fully include and encourage participation from everyone.
The likelihood is that the teams you lead spend time working from home, the office, the commute and beyond. But wherever they’re working, leaders shouldn’t underestimate the value of the pointless meeting, whether virtual or in-person, in fostering conversations for possibility that may drive the next wave of innovation and growth in your organisation.
04
The eight questions that can transform the power of coaching
Today, the importance of coaching as part of a leader’s responsibilities is widely appreciated. The best leaders act as coaches for their teams, creating the spaces, environments and cultures in which individuals can afford to experiment, make breakthroughs, and declare authentic commitments and future possibilities.
But, as we’ve explored in recent blogs, there is always a balance between coaching and direct instruction. When it comes to procedures or instructions that must be followed, clarity is critical and coaching may not be the way to go. But how can leaders get the balance right and be better coaches to their teams?
In this blog, Ric Bulzis, distils a set of eight questions that have emerged from his work with leaders across sectors and organisations big and small. Each can be used to open conversations for possibility with direct reports, and provide a valuable entry point for self-enquiry that can improve leadership abilities.
1. What would you really want if there were no limits?
People self-limit all the time. Constrained by the unseen contexts of their role, the organisation, expectations of the team and the leader, they opt for what they think they
can have, rather than what they really want. This narrows their thinking and limits possibilities and creativity.
It’s the role of a coach and a leader to unearth the deep commitments, hidden assumptions, background commitments, and limitations within their teams. By asking direct reports what they would do if unshackled, it’s possible to expand possibilities while also establishing a safe environment in which honesty and authenticity are prized above all else.
2. What needs to change for you to be successful?
A great follow-up to the first question, this allows a leader and coach to understand background commitments and assumptions that are preventing individuals from achieving their goals.
Amidst concerns around resources and expertise will lurk what we refer to as “rackets”. These are the behaviours, assumptions or other commitments that have a present-day payoff for the individual, but which undermine commitment to future possibilities. For example, “I need a better plan,” may in fact be a racket. The payoff of is security, but the cost is taking a risky step that could prove game-changing.
The skill in coaching this question is not providing solutions, but probing and leading the individual to spot their own rackets and perceive new opportunities to break free of them.
3. What do you need to learn or explore?
A coach is someone whose conversation has a direct impact on the team’s performance. Their role is to encourage individuals to explore and grow. Use this question to re-direct those who are overly wedded to a plan or a specific course of action. Use it to inspire, ignite imagination and a willingness to experiment. Deployed at the right point it can initiate new thinking and expand possibilities.
4. What unpopular action might lead to progress?
No one particularly likes to point out where things are coming apart or where actions are not producing intended results. But identifying breakdowns is essential to making breakthroughs.
By asking directly what the unpopular action would be, leader-coaches can guide their reports to be better and bolder at calling these out. Helping individuals to not only be aware of potential breakdowns, but to actively seek them out as ways of accelerating progress is one of the most powerful aspects of coaching.
5. If you could give one piece of straight feedback, what would it be and what’s stopping you giving it?
Most of us will have feedback we’d like to give to colleagues – so what’s stopping us? Once again assumptions, rackets and background commitments could be the answer. We are less good at giving ourselves honest feedback but, having
explored why we’d not speak straight with someone else, it becomes easier to ask the same question of ourselves.
6. Could you tell me what I’m committed to as a leader of this team?
As with other questions this must be asked from an authentic desire to really understand. What’s important for any leader is to listen not for playback of what you’ve said you are committed to, nor even for what your team thinks you should be committed to, but for a real resonance with your true commitment.
Not only will this identify where your own background commitments are but identify the truly shared commitments that drive success. The natural gaps in understanding of commitments are opportunities to create breakthroughs.
7. How ‘at stake’ are you for your team’s success right now?
Part of leadership is shouldering responsibility to shield the team and allowing them to play all out without fear of consequence. Putting yourself fully at stake – not just in terms of recognition, role and job security, but fundamentally, psychologically fully investing in a future possibility, not only frees your team to go all out to deliver it but frees you as leader to completely dedicate to success. Asking this question in these terms not only creates a clearing for radical, breakthrough thinking, but creates real energy and vitality in a team.
8. What are other possible interpretations here?
This final question can be one of the most useful, but also most dangerous. Stepping away from interpretation, putting aside assumptions and judgements, and focusing on facts is core to the breakdown process. So, asking direct reports to consider
alternative interpretations might seem counter intuitive.
But the mental act of considering alternative points of view is also a powerful approach to create new options, opportunities and alternative ways forward. Leaders should never use this question to quash or dismiss the concerns of their team members nor to reinforce their own righteousness. However, well handled, this approach can help individuals move past anxiousness about situations or seemingly insurmountable problems and to re-engage with alternative solutions.
To be effective today’s leaders must become skilful coaches. The eight questions highlighted can start that journey, but continual investment in environments and cultures that support open, honest and safe communication are the essential foundations on which they can build.
05
If necessity is the mother of invention, why hasn’t business become sustainable?
Human impact on earth-system processes has put the planet in crisis. 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded, and it looks increasingly unlikely that the 2015 Paris Agreement – the international treaty to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – will be honoured.
Businesses will naturally play a central collective role in turning the tide and making progress against global warming. And in our experience, they’re genuine in their desire to make real change. Yet despite this desire, and despite the size, scope and immediacy of our sustainability emergency, we haven’t managed to make sufficient progress.
In last week’s blog, Justin Temblett-Wood explored how challenging ‘hidden assumptions’ can help procurement departments drive sustainability across their organisation. This week, he looks at how leaders can drive a shift in attitude to sustainability across a business, and move progress away from ‘top-down’ mandates.
The political obstacles to true sustainability
We know it’s not a technology deficit, scientific misinterpretation or incapacity to transform systems that’s the issue. We know the technological innovations and ‘clean’
options exist. However, the cost of their deployment is prohibitive and the only groups capable of operating at a global scale — governments, non-profits and businesses – all have competing background commitments preventing them from rapidly advancing sustainability agendas.
On a planet of nearly 8 billion people, most sustainable breakthroughs are hindered by global politics because nations are so far from the same starting point. Eradicating poverty in all its forms is crucial to sustainable development and yet there’s no uniform solution for improving access to sustainable livelihoods.
These miscellaneous starting points mean the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are not legally binding, instead relying on individual countries to make their own sustainable development policies, plans and programmes.
Our leaders don’t have enough at stake
There’s something else underpinning our globally sluggish response though and that’s ‘at stake-ness’. Leaders (whether world leaders, or business leaders) need to have something at risk beyond the problems the planet is presenting in order to act on them.
Most governments are looking to see what the consequences of green subsidies, policies and initiatives are before deciding whether or not to put their nations’ economies and industries at risk. But sustainable breakthroughs will only happen if these leaders put their own positions, livelihoods and reputations at stake to pursue sustainability.
The same is true in business. However, there are some notable trailblazers. While he was the CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman intrinsically understood the dilemma at stake-ness posed to the organisation’s sustainability successes and refused to report the company’s quarterly earnings to stakeholders as a result.
It’s a bold and extraordinary example of a leader putting their identity at stake. Investor, shareholder and board relations all suffered as a result, but it enabled Polman to lead in relation to his sustainability commitments.
Radical transformation delivered by vulnerable leadership
Ørsted, an energy company that was once one of the most coal-intensive in Europe, recognised how its work was damaging our society in 2010. Their response? They decided to transform into a business based on renewable energy, becoming the world’s most sustainable energy company in the process and the only one in the world with a net-zero emissions target validated by the Science Based Target initiative (SBTi).
Ørsted and Polman both showed a capacity to put their roles and themselves at risk in order to achieve change. This is one of the basic tenets of what we call vulnerable leadership. It moves us away from egobased direction, that looks to control systems and people, towards radical change. If leaders don’t put themselves at stake then they’ll only ever be able to play small within the existing system. The greatest leaders and changemakers in the world have always been able to put themselves
at stake to further a cause.
We work with a lot of companies to create a purpose-led leadership and organisational structure, many of whom are challenging traditional industry conventions. Success is about leadership, cultural change and contextual management, but it doesn’t have to be hierarchical – change can also come from the middle of organisations and radiate outwards.
Change can come from anywhere in an organisation
Sustainability might sound relevant only to a board member or an executive-level manager, but sustainability advances don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) be top-down mandated.
In our Breakthrough Sustainability programme we divide sustainable breakthroughs into four contexts: Think | Accelerate | Influence | Resilience.
These areas of work are not sequential, so they create a good model for movement anywhere in an organisation. They’re a great way for teams to create and achieve breakthroughs at a departmental level. Some examples of this include:
- Taking visible ownership of the sustainability agenda
- Acting from the future
- Driving internal conversations
- Analysing the assumptions holding your team back
- Implementing changes without waiting to be instructed
It’s all about having the confidence to take permission, instead of waiting for it to be granted. This aligns us with the behaviour of great leaders, no matter where we find ourselves in an organisation.
06
How procurement departments can lead a sustainability ‘assumption revolution’
More than ever, companies are coming under scrutiny for their sustainability credentials. In the UK, EU and the wider world, regulators are clamping down, particularly around greenwashing and lack of supply chain transparency. And while 80% of people globally say they would pay more for sustainable products, they are also becoming savvier: over half of UK consumers would boycott brands found to be misleading in their sustainability claims.
Scope 3 (or supply chain) emissions are the major emissions contributor for most companies. So increasingly, procurement teams face a tough balancing act: they need to develop an ethical, sustainable supply chain without losing sight of traditional concerns such as ensuring profitability and resilience.
To do so involves trusting partners and turning traditional business practices on their head. As leaders, we may find our organisation, our teams or our partners are struggling to take these risks. But this might have nothing to do with courage or capability – and everything to do with checking hidden assumptions.
Could Breakthrough Thinking enable you to take this leap of faith?
Our hidden assumptions are holding us back
There are a lot of conventional assumptions about what ‘successful’ procurement is and what constitutes a profitable supply chain. These could be background assumptions found within teams about the role of procurement generally, alongside beliefs of how their success will be measured.
Driving a sustainability agenda means success must be measured via sustainable objectives rather than cost savings. But do your organisation’s layers know, allow and make room for that?
Context is decisive. Our team’s thoughts around sustainability form invisible beliefs, assumptions and a culture that governs the actions they do or don’t take. It’s the reason why change can sometimes seem to stagnate.
Some hidden assumptions that could be filtering through our teams include:
- “Short-term profit is more important to the company than long-term sustainability.”
- “We’ve made the decision to be sustainable as an organisation but it doesn’t affect my work.”
- “I’ll be told when the sustainability work is relevant to me and when I need to do something about it.”
- “We can only do so much with our suppliers, it’s up to them to make the changes needed.”
- “I really care about climate change but I can’t do much to make a difference.”
Our entire organisation might also be operating within the assumed mindset that: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. In this instance, if our sustainability teams have little to measure or report on in the first year of a new initiative, then leaders and boards won’t have the metrics they need to extend resources in those areas.
What are you committed to, really?
With multiple tensions at play both internally and externally around the cost of sustainable growth versus profit, it’s up to leaders to identify what your organisation is committed to.
If your organisation’s KPIs are based on financial gains, then your procurement teams will be motivated to drive towards value and cost-effectiveness. If these KPIs are adjusted to ensure all teams are trained in sustainable procurement, or to eliminate a certain percentage of Scope 3 emissions from the supply chain, then progress can be made and measured differently.
At Unilever, Paul Polman asked, “If the planet was more important than our profit, what would we do differently?”. This became a mandate around everything from project allocation to decision making; procurement to brand strategy.
Cutting
back on ‘either/or’ thinking
Breakthrough thinking moves us away from binary ‘either/or’ decision making towards an ‘and’ mindset. Instead of assuming we need to prioritise profit or sustainability, we ask “could both these things be true at once?”. This leads us to eschew old practices and adopt a more nuanced approach.
In a 2020 CDP Supply Chain Report, 8,000 suppliers reported that $1.26tr of revenue was likely to be at risk over the coming years due to environmental threats to supply chains. So clearly profit and sustainability goals are not diametrically opposed. Unless we reward triple bottom line outcomes, we might end up with little profit, and potentially no business.
We can apply ‘And’ thinking to redefine the set of assumptions driving hidden assumptions and behaviours within our organisations. It prompts us to ask:
- “Do all our departments need a sustainability KPI?”
- “What can’t we measure and how do we commit to it regardless?”
- “Why are we doing this? Is it for branding and marketing or a bigger purpose?”
- “Are teams waiting to be told what to do?”
Tuning into our ‘little voice’
We all have a little voice present in our decision-making processes. It’s what governs our responses and forms the bedrock of our assumptions.
This is why Paul Polman’s question (“If the planet was more important than our profit, what would we do differently?”) was so effective. It revealed the ‘little voice’ people were carrying and challenged the core assumptions they were bringing to decisions as a result. He created a new spine in the organisation that would reposition everything from project initiation and execution to stakeholder management and KPIs.
We need to challenge current contexts and reveal the organisational goldfish bowl in which our teams are swimming. If we don’t, we’ll only ever see results within existing frameworks.
Joining the dots for employees
After starting work on the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine in January 2020, teams at
AstraZeneca worked around the clock to bring it to market. We spoke recently with someone at the company about the huge employee engagement opportunity this created.
People were all in on the cause, but researchers, technicians, volunteers and other staff based across multiple sites still needed to feel a sense of meaningful progress to know that their contribution mattered and stay motivated. Important milestones along the way, such as clinical trial results, enabled employees to know their efforts were going to change the course of the pandemic.
As leaders, we need to make sure people see a connection between what they care about and what they do every day, even if the connection isn’t obvious. Most employees want to feel connected to sustainability goals while at work; it’s our job as leaders to foster these aspirations and link them to our organisation’s overall mission.
07 Managing “tension tightropes” as a leader
A collaborative work environment is typically linked to productivity and a healthy-looking bottom line, so it stands to reason that businesses are looking for collaborative people who can get along well with their colleagues. At the same time, companies are often on the lookout for innovative trailblazers who can challenge the status quo and established ways of thinking, and drive the organisation forward.
Businesses often believe they’ll be able to embed and maintain these seemingly incompatible traits in full. However, leaders need to reconcile the natural tensions and competing commitments of these cultures to make this possible.
Interlinked tensions
Duke Corporate Education outlines the six paradoxes that form an interlinked strategic landscape and system of natural tensions that today’s leaders need to be able to navigate. These include the inherent contradictions of being both a ‘Humble hero’ and a ‘Traditioned innovator’. Walking the line between each of these paradoxes is key to being able to confront, with focus and depth, the varied challenges at play in the modern-day workplace.
At Achieve Breakthrough, we see tensions extend beyond these leadership
asymmetries as well, and into other contradictory agendas rife in our modern organisational cultures. As Gary P. Pisano of Harvard Business School points out, ‘celebrating failure’ is a nuance many companies are striving to hardwire into their cultural code, but that doesn’t mean inviting incompetence into workflows. There is a spectrum of scenarios between ‘failure’ and ‘incompetence’ that leaders need to navigate.
Similarly, we have an organisational culture of 100% responsibility at Achieve Breakthrough, but we also acknowledge that it’s possible – due to competing commitments – to take this principle too far and into a scenario where everyone treads on each other’s toes. That’s because there are always polarities at play in the world of work and effective leadership has to adapt to them.
Competing commitments
Whichever way competing commitments play out in your workplace (some sort of polarity is bound to, we wouldn’t believe you if said there weren’t any) the first point to acknowledge is that this is normal. Competing contexts have always and will always exist.
Your organisation might think of itself as
fundamentally collaborative, for example, but know this sometimes causes increased costs, delays in getting to market or other accountability issues that are sometimes tricky to resolve under a ‘collaborative’ umbrella. The fact that these two competing contexts persist isn’t the issue, it’s the way the push-pull relationship between them is managed that’s key.
So what’s the fix? Well, leaders have to get clear on the overarching commitment unifying the outcome of a project or business pursuit. This way we can provide teams with a functional path through the dense undergrowth where the roots of competing commitments each fight for space.
What’s the goal?
When committing to big cultural nuances such as ‘collaboration’, ‘celebrating failure’ or ‘willingness to experiment’, deciding on a specific unifying commitment is a way of establishing what that nuance means to our exact workplace environment.
A leader might decide the overarching organisational commitment is to ‘innovation’ for example, which allows teams to contextualise the falls and gains of both ‘collaboration’ and ‘accountability’ in their project workflows. From here, they can navigate the different working parts of each commitment and strive for breakthrough results instead of binary compromises.
Without an overarching commitment, organisations might attempt to embed cultural modulations without thinking about the outcome they’re actually intended to achieve. If we think about introducing a ‘psychologically safe environment’ it might be because we’re attracted to the idea of having a nice place to work, but that could run counter to an existing commitment to brutal candour that’s already driving innovation in our teams.
Avoiding binary thinking
There’s always a gradation in the particulars
of a situation, and as leaders we need to be able to see the shading instead of binary oppositions. Allowing tensions into our workplaces might feel like a contradiction at first but it’s really just another step towards avoiding binary thinking. Creating space for the tension tightrope that’s already strung up in our organisations allows our teams to walk it comfortably whenever they need to.
A good example of achieving success via upheld commitments can be found at John Lewis where the Partnership is one of the largest employee-owned businesses in the UK with a workforce of 80,000 Partners.
Their business model comes with all sorts of polarities – most notably being employee-centric as well as customer-centric. But John Lewis makes it work by being very clear on its values, ensuring they hold relevance to both the customer and its Partners, so that all the business co-owners are empowered along the same narrative line in the face of competing commitments.
Declaring our true commitments allows our teams to work with the polarities and contradictory agendas that are so essential to an organisation. In acknowledging that there’s no set way things should be, we invite our organisations to exist more as living organisms, fully comfortable with all the natural tensions that play out in them.
08
From managers to leaders: Developing the next generation in your organisation
Middle managers seeking to make the leap into leadership are a core focus for companies eager to retain their top talent. Here, Della Owen explains how Achieve Breakthrough’s ‘Emerging Leaders’ programmes help companies nurture these highly motivated individuals.
Ambitious middle managers are likely to find themselves at a crossroads. They’ve got perhaps 15-20 years of technical expertise and some people management experience under their belts, and they’re thinking: what next?
But a leadership role is not just another rung on the career ladder – it requires a huge mindset shift. Achieve Breakthrough’s ‘Emerging Leaders’ programme can help your talented middle managers make the leap from functional managers to transformational leaders.
Managers vs. leaders
The difference between a manager and a leader is more than just a few more years’ experience. A manager has functional expertise and probably some people management responsibilities. They have worked up in their area, and have a great understanding within it.
But, while a manager deals with the
day-to-day process, results and people, a leader’s role is to manage and define the frame of reference for the entire organisation. They have the ability to think strategically and make decisions from an enterprise mindset. They have a set of muscles that enable them to think in defining, transformational terms.
Leaders also have the ability, the mandate and the responsibility to challenge convention and the status quo. They see the bigger picture and have the skills to challenge and remove what is in no longer in service of the organisation, its stakeholders, customers and people.
Ultimately, a good leader needs to be the creator and architect of new possibilities for the organisation. While managers are employees of their organisation, leaders are its stewards.
Motivated for leadership and a mindset of possibility
Our ‘Emerging Leaders’ programmes are not Management 101: we start from the assumption that participants know the basics. Instead, the aim is to give emerging talent the support needed to step over the line from manager to leader. That doesn’t just suddenly click (it would be lovely if it did!). Nor do people go on our programmes and
immediately become a leader in the business! It’s about opening up their route into leadership.
At the heart of our programmes is developing people’s ability to generate new possibilities. They become leaders with vision, who can architect and implement the ambition they hold, bringing others along on the journey and making what was deemed impossible, possible.
We spend a lot of time on the self, requiring aspiring leaders to ask themselves: who are we, what limits us, what drives us, how do we communicate, where do we listen from, how does our approach impact others?
This self-awareness helps participants understand where learnt assumptions may need to be challenged, and where established approaches may need to be flexed in service of others and the outcomes they are looking to produce. Alongside this, we develop the mindset that, as leaders, they are each 100% responsible for who they are being and the actions they take – that they are empowered and accountable.
Then we get into the detail. What is the mindset of a coach? What is our mindset when it comes to our relationships with others? And how do we hold possibility for others? How do we enrol and tell stories? How do we influence? How do we lead through setbacks, without reducing what we are committed to?
Applying our programmes and overcoming challenges to success
In all Achieve Breakthrough’s work, context is decisive. We develop leaders for your specific organisation, not just leadership skills that could apply to any business. We take into account your framework, strategy, context, and organisational goals – then apply our methodology around that.
A year-long programme, for example, includes a face-to-face launch week; intersessional virtual modules; 121 coaching;
and group coaching. Tangible, business application is key to these programmes.
Inevitably, with any comprehensive and difficult development journey, challenges will arise for participant – in fact, we hope they do! We give people tools and strategies to implement and think about, but it’s natural that other demands on time meant that these aren’t always put into practice at every opportunity. The grip of conventional thinking (in other word reverting to established ways of doing things when things get tough) is strong. This is very human and normal. After all, we’re asking leaders to unlearn a lot of what has served them well (their beliefs, assumptions, ways of seeing the world and assumptions). This doesn’t happen in a day, a week, or even a year.
There are several ways we ensure commitment, both during and after the programme. Leadership sponsorship and line management sponsorship is key. There are various interventions: in-person, virtual, and coaching. Participants are partnered with groups, and the Google Chat between participants is always buzzing. We’re there to give them continuous coaching and challenging: checking in with them, pulling them back and challenging that connection to the way they’ve done things before.
So, in contrast to many leadership programmes, the drop-out rate is negligible: That translates to an excellent ROI.
09
When should I coach my team and when shouldn’t
I?
In 2008 Google launched Project Oxygen to better understand what kind of leadership hierarchy the company needed to operate at its best. The prevailing view in Silicon Valley at the time was that a flat hierarchy was the way forward, but in reality that often caused bottlenecks with one individual making decisions on everything. To find the ideal structure, Google stripped back as many layers of management as possible to work out what they then needed to bring back.
Part of Project Oxygen was a study into what makes a good leader. While leadership is more than just a shopping list of competencies, one of the responses that kept coming out on top was coaching. That’s not unique to Google, either. Right across the business world, leaders have seen a huge movement to embrace coaching and the facilitation of learning as an essential responsibility.
But although coaching is critical to leadership, it’s also true that it doesn’t apply to every situation. There are even times when taking a coaching approach is not only less helpful than a direct instruction but can also cause some major headaches. Knowing where to draw that line isn’t always clear, both for long-time leaders and those new to their roles.
The coaching continuum
The first step to knowing when or when not to coach is understanding that coaching itself is not binary. It’s more like different modes that sit along a continuum, and their uses are contextual.
At one end of the continuum is facilitation, or what you might get from a professional coach. In this mode the emphasis is on asking powerful questions and empowering others to find answers themselves. The coach’s own insights rarely come into the equation.
On the other end is coaching centred around putting forward specific, technical insights to help guide the other person. Leaders within organisations tend to fall towards this end of the spectrum. They have likely trodden the same path as their direct reports, and therefore they can offer guidance on how to avoid potential pitfalls.
For leaders adopting coaching, it’s not always about striving to emulate a pure, professional facilitator. Sometimes there’s a need to provide your own technical insights, and the nuance will always be led by the context and what best suits your direct report’s needs.
When coaching works best
At its heart coaching is about fostering and developing potential, which makes it particularly apt for organisations trying to innovate and disrupt their market. Organisations like these thrive on hiring high-potential knowledge workers, whose main value is in the unique technical skillset and perspective they bring to the table.
Here the model of a leader who’s a greater expert than everyone else doesn’t fit – if you already have someone who knows all the answers, you don’t need to hire that team of brilliant minds to report to them. But when your direct reports are there to find unique solutions to problems and not just execute a task, coaching will achieve that far better than a mandate.
Coaching is also the answer when you’re looking for commitment to your organisation’s mission. This is perhaps especially true of startups, but it applies to any organisation driven by a cause and a set of values.
You can’t mandate commitment – you can only try to foster it in your team. Everyone will apply their own perspective and interpretation to that mission and won’t always buy into it for the same reasons you did. But coaching can help them find the right mindset so they reach the same conclusion.
When coaching should be avoided
Coaching works best when the goal is to empower your direct reports to find their own answers or solutions. But when a clear instruction is needed, coaching isn’t really appropriate.
Take underperformance, for example. If a direct report is seriously underperforming you might be reluctant to give them bold feedback. Coaching them to see where they can improve might feel sufficient. But if they’re already aware of the issue and it’s still cropping up, that’s a sign that
coaching isn’t going to resolve it – instead you need to lay out clear targets and tell your report to meet them.
The same goes for when your expertise and knowledge as a leader does exceed that of your direct reports. Trying to coach someone into giving an answer you already know often doesn’t give them a feeling of agency – instead it can leave them feeling quizzed, or like a pupil answering a teacher in the classroom. If you know how something must be done, it’s OK to be direct.
And, of course, when it comes to procedures or instructions that must be followed, clarity is critical and coaching is rarely going to cut it. Sometimes there’s no room for confusion, particularly when it comes to things like health and safety. Standard operating procedures can only be mandated, not coached.
However coaching can still be brought in to encourage feedback on those procedures. You can set out clear instructions on what’s expected, while still giving your direct reports scope to challenge any breakdowns they might see. That way you can have your cake and eat it too.
10
Five common attributes of high performing teams
Leaders and organisations want and demand highly effective teams that perform consistently and deliver on corporate goals. However, high-performance teams, even (especially) those carefully constructed to leverage the best efforts of superstar performers, often fail to live up to their potential. How can leaders achieve breakthrough performance, and do it again and again? How can they create agile, resilient teams able to function in volatile and ambiguous situations whilst staying focused on a single vision?
Our work to architect, develop and maintain high-performance teams in some of the largest and most successful organisations globally has identified five common attributes.
When each is present and activated fully, teams not only accomplish amazing things, but are inspirational, inspired and self-energising to continually outperform.
1. A shared commitment
It all starts with commitment. Leaders need not only to make bold personal declarations of their commitments, but to constantly on-board everyone in the team. Enrolment is not a one-off, start of project exercise. Leaders need to listen carefully to the voices in the team, including the
whispered, quiet and even unspoken. The aim should be to constantly check for hidden commitments within themselves and the team that can undermine the potential future the team has declared.
Teams that honestly and completely declare commitment to a share potential future, and can envision standing in that future together, are well placed to deliver outstanding results. Commitment to this co-imagined future, rather than a plan or a set of milestones is what sets high-performance teams apart. It is the energy that drives a shared passion.
2. An environment built on passion not pressure
To paraphrase Simon Sinek passion is an output generated by working in ways that align with personal priorities and values. Leaders can create environments where team members feel invited and included in conversations about what to do. Two subtle but important shifts in language and conversation are key to generating this engagement.
Firstly, hold conversations where the whole team can contribute ideas, insight and imagination to help define what could be done. Co-creation of next steps allows for alignment of values and personal goals
with the team objective. It also creates ownership and commitment that leads to passion for the project.
Secondly, as leaders move to conversations for action, they should adopt the language of request and promise rather than command and requirements. No one can force the committed labour of anyone, but requesting contributions, and eliciting commitments creates the opportunity for individuals to volunteer their best work in service of the team’s goals. Providing people with ways to bring their whole selves to the task will engender higher performance. However, breakthrough performance requires courage to step beyond the familiar.
3. A leader whose door is always open
When individuals feel safe, secure and supported they become more creative, engaged and willing to take risks. Contrary to what many think, it is not solely the role of HR to establish the systems, processes and people who can create psychologically safe, encouraging environments. Leaders create cultures and must constantly reemphasise and demonstrate their support for their teams and all the individuals in them.
Trust is crucial. A good leader will refrain from constantly calling on teams to ‘trustme’ and instead honestly ask themselves – am I trustworthy? Actively demonstrating trustworthiness through proactive examples will not only win trust but establish the frameworks in which all team members can demonstrate their own trustworthiness. Switching focus from the passive to the active earning of trust quickly creates an environment where everyone feels safe to rely on each other, to make requests and to provide honest, open commitment to ideas and people.
4. Encouraging and embracing challenge
In these high-trust, high safety teams,
challenging assumptions becomes much easier. We are all defined by our context, and without passion, commitment and psychological safety, it is easy to leave it unchallenged. But without challenge there can be no innovation and growth. Change and results will be incremental at best. Respectful, but direct feedback, honest appraisal of how things really are, and courage to suggest new approaches are all essential to delivering outstanding achievement.
Leaders in particular must be open to challenge. They are not there to provide all the answers or to swoop in with solutions when things breakdown. Their fundamental role is to create the space for others to explore, suggest and co-create solutions as situations arise.
5. Self-respect
Together these four actions will create teams to which individuals can bring their best work. Given authority, responsibility and accountability, individuals will leverage their own self-respect to maximise their impact. In these environments every team member will be confident not only in their leader and their peers, but in their own abilities to participate, collaborate and contribute to outstanding results. Working with people they trust, delivering tasks and activities that they believe in and understand, in pursuit of an imagined future that they feel personal commitment to, all encourage them to produce their life’s best work.
So next time you set about creating a high-performance team, focus less on the individuals exceeding today’s targets and more on creating the environment in which everyone can excel in delivering a shared potential future of which they are proud.