Transformation Won’t Work if You Keep Making This Mistake
Are you accidentally undermining your organisation’s transformation? This is actually much more common than you’d imagine.
Here’s what happens: Leaders often agree with transformation in theory. It sounds great—setting clear objectives, becoming more customer-centric, delivering more value.
But in practice, transformation isn’t just about changing everyone else. As a leader, you need to change, too.
If you believe that transformation is everyone else’s business but not yours, that’s where you can get into trouble.
The hard-earned lessons for leaders
I understand why this happens. You’ve worked hard to get to where you are today. You’ve earned your position and authority by approaching your work in a certain way. You’ve spent time in those executive offsites and boardrooms working with your peers to define your strategy and tactics.
But now you have to leave all that behind.
Because transformation isn’t just for everyone else. It involves you, too. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.
This can be an uncomfortable inflection point because it involves learning that what made you successful up until now won’t necessarily continue to serve you well. Your role as a leader is no longer about controlling from the top down.
A new model for leadership
So what you’ve been doing up until now no longer works. What does this updated take on leadership look like? Your new role involves taking a step back. You are no longer telling your team what to do and you are instead supporting, enabling, and collaborating with them. This model is sometimes called “servant leadership.”
Here are some of the actions you can take as a servant leader:
Create strategic direction and clarity around outcomes
Offer data-driven suggestions
Bring in a customer-centric perspective
Share outcomes to cross-functional teams and align them around the same goals
Seek input from your team on what they are learning
Allow room for decision-making
No one said it would be easy
The challenges we’re facing in the business world today are complex. We can’t rely on the gut decisions of a small group of leaders. We need more people involved. We have to acknowledge that as leaders we can’t always have the answers. We need to be gutsy, brave, and vulnerable.
Here are a few of the steps you can take to adopt this new style of leadership:
Build a culture of trust. Encourage your team to ask questions, seek solutions, and make mistakes along the way.
Create the space for your teams to be creative. Rather than dictating outputs, you can provide an outcome and trust your team to figure out the best way to get there.
Be curious. Ask questions. Strive to understand the context and data that is driving decisions. Show your team you’re invested in their learning by asking about their learning goals.
Be humble. Remember, you are acting in service of your team and customers.
Be engaged—but without micromanaging. Your goal is to unblock people and create the space for them to do their best work. This does not mean constantly asking for status reports.
Taking the next steps
Making these changes isn’t easy. I invite you to embrace the challenge—remember that what made you successful and how you’ve been judged in the past will no longer serve you. And it takes a lot of guts to move in this new direction.
This is why I offer coaching to leaders. I can help you navigate the challenges of this transition so your organisational transformation is much more likely to succeed. If you’d like to learn more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
