How challenging it can be to start a journey into the unknown.  

There was a lot in my last blog (read it here) and I promised I would come back to it. In brief, it was about creating a new culture. The impetus for the business leader in the case I discussed in that blog was to retain his best employees and attract new talent that would bring the skills and attitude that were making the business more successful.

I’ve been reflecting on it, inevitably, and it struck me that he said he felt this transformation was the most difficult he’d faced as he did not have a road map to get him back on track when he felt he was going too far out of his comfort zone.

This got me to reflect on my own leadership journey. For me, replace ‘road map’ with ‘manual’ or ‘course’ but I felt that same sense of challenge. I had always believed that by reading the most up-to-date leadership books and attending management courses I couldn’t go wrong. Following ‘best practice’ in this way worked very well for me for the 20 years I spent managing three manufacturing plants so why should I change my opinion?

The wisdom behind a road block

I brought this ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach into my new coaching and mentoring business and again enjoyed a relatively good level of success for the next 20 years. However, like the forum participant, I hit a road block. In my case, rather than losing employees, I was losing clients. This was because I had not re-invented what I offered to excite them enough to want to continue to purchase my services. There was a chink of light; I realised that 5% of my business was built on a new approach and this part of the business was not suffering from client fatigue. Wonderful, yes, but I had a real concern about expanding this approach as it involved going into a group with no textbook answers to their challenges and relying on the group to connect with their own wisdom. Sound familiar? It’s the ethos behind my peer-to-peer forums and it is today 100% of my business model, but back then, nobody else that I knew about in the marketplace was doing this and no text books or leadership courses were reporting on how best to achieve this.

Courage (or desperation) to experiment

Looking back, I was desperate enough to try anything, so I went with it. Over the following seven years, I learned that when I trust people to access their wisdom they are capable of coming up with much better solutions to challenges than the stock answers that come from courses and text books. It then became a matter of tweaking the process. For the old me, it was always about finding a tried-and-trusted solution that has worked over the years; this new way is counter to how I have been trained and educated.

In my last blog I wrote, ‘The initial change has to start with the key leader. He/she needs to start the journey without knowing how it will develop. How thrilling and exciting is that?’ I have to admit to being rather more nervous than excited when I was going through this ‘experiment’ myself.

Now I can look back and say with confidence that when it comes to culture and human relationships the old approaches do not work for most people.

What was exciting was to hear how the forum participant in my last blog had much the same experience as myself. He discovered that when he engaged his people at all levels in the company by asking them what would excite them about the company’s purpose, they came up with a much more expansive vision than he considered possible. Over the following year he noticed a shift in people’s energies and creativity as they rowed in behind a vision they had created (previously many employees did just enough to get by). He found he no longer needed to manage or review KPIs; the employees took more responsibility for the results.

He reflected that the more freedom he gave people the better the control of the business he had. Previously, he tried to control through policies, rules and reports, yet he rarely felt in real control. Now he is learning a new skill of facilitating rather than directing and driving change.

How is your leadership approach changing? How could you engage differently with others so they feel ownership of the company’s mission and vision?