Given Sri Lanka’s present crisis, leadership effectiveness has, is and will continue to be tested more heavily than ever before from many different angles and nuances.
Great leaders keep a cool head and continue to work rationally, relying particularly on their ability to think systemically. They analyse the new reality, adjust their mental models, evaluate the options, make decisions and only then act.
However, unlike normal times, they must do all of this with agility and speed. Moving to a new level of leadership requires the ability to influence others to achieve what is needed.
In leadership, there are two extremes when it comes to predictability. On one hand we have those leaders who are stuck in the mud, staid and perhaps boring. You know what they will say even before they open their mouth on regular issues and what type of decision you can expect.
Some leaders are invisible but some are like wallpapers - in other words, predictable. It’s boring and uninspiring for the people that work for them. It’s also inappropriate for the rapidly evolving, ever changing, uncertain environment within which most of today’s businesses are operating.
At the same time, there are leaders who are erratic, overly emotional and easily swayed by their circumstances. You are never quite sure what you are going to get, and you hope that you get them on a ‘good day’.
If the boss himself is under stress due to work related or personal issues, look out. While maintaining unpredictability for good reasons, you wish to display a measured, calm demeanor so that your people aren’t scared to approach you with bad news.
You wish to encourage interactions where people feel safe, so that they can be unguarded and open with you. Strong, stable leadership is important. The sturdy captain at the helm of the ship.
However, equally important in today’s world is dynamic, vibrant leadership. Effective, modern leaders need to work on creating frequent, exciting interventions in the workplace through their actions, words and approaches. Delivering the unexpected, being memorable through creativity, surprising people with something different.
Be true to your heart
Get out of your ivory tower. You can’t cause much of a stir from up on high. Get out the office, get to the floor, get among your people and breathe the same air.
Take people by surprise and keep doing different things and things you do regularly, differently. After all you need to create an exciting environment and maintain freshness in action.
People love it when their leaders do the unexpected. Don’t keep calm and carry on.
When your business environment shifts and the approach stops working, call a business-critical town hall, get onto the shop floor to galvanise views, get your middle managers on the phone - in other words intervene and rally the troops. Often ideas come from the most unexpected places.
Be true to your heart, be authentic and emotional if it makes you naturally emotional. True engagement comes when you touch people via their head and their heart.
It’s simple - people remember the things that make them smile or cry. Being emotional on both ends of the scale, as a leader, is not a weakness. High impact leadership interventions are clever as well as creative, playing devil’s advocate, making people think, connecting on a deeper level.
To really surprise an audience, leaders need to get creative, go deep and think smart.
Make it personal. If we feel something, we are more likely to act on it. Tell personal stories, share your own memories, reflect on your own life experiences.
Bring your thinking to life through creative, disruptive communications that get remembered. Employees no longer want a filtered, polished version of their leaders - they want real, human interventions delivering information in an authentic way. Get out from behind the camera, forget the polished corporate communications script and just get out there and talk to your people.