Career development and destinations are common topics in my coaching conversations. With a lot of my clients leading innovation / transformation I decided I needed a point of view on the competencies linked to their leadership success. Recognising the diversity of roles, cultures and organisational contexts my pragmatic ambition was a model that a) was more than generic leadership and b) could stimulate reflection and choices in future conversations. It’s captured below.
This model integrates evidenced elements from wide sources and the key publications are listed at the end of this article. Some of my bolder choices warrant some explanation:
1. Emotional intelligence at the core. Research has highlighted that accurate self-awareness, stress tolerance, impulse control, positive thinking, self-motivation, identifying with one’s social group and cooperating effectively as especially important emotional intelligence competencies1. Furthermore, teams with high self-awareness are much more likely to achieve alignment and resolve conflict2. Understanding, managing and developing one’s self is surely the bulls-eye for personal development and also vindicates a commitment to self-discovery through coaching!
2. Conveying vision, purpose and values as a mega-competency. The continuous, authentic communication / demonstration of vision, purpose and values supports achievement across all dimensions. It is undeniably critical to gaining commitment to change. Noteworthy, is research showing shared vision builds organisational / team goal commitment and so enables for transformational leadership3.
3. Calling out the distinct challenge for initiating and delivering innovation and change. This reflects interviews I conducted with innovation leaders from big organisations in 2022. I distilled this into 3 elements: a) establishing and empowering teams to learn and adapt at pace, b) supporting sustained experimentation (and by implication the psychological safety for teams to try and fail) and c) the ability to think (and connect) across boundaries. The latter, is especially important for finding models and approaches to commercialisation and elusive scale in complex organisations.
As promised I have captured some of influential publications below:
1. Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results (William A. Adams, Robert J. Anderson)
2. Coaching for emotionally intelligent leadership (Jonathan Perks and Professor Reuven Bar-On)
3. We’re Not Very Self-Aware, Especially at Work (Erich C. Dierdorff and Robert S. Rubin)
4. Transformational Leadership and Organizational Commitment in Teams: The Mediating Roles of Shared Vision and Team-Goal Commitment. (Dae Seok Chai, Seog Joo Hwang and Baek-Kyoo Joo)
5. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (Daniel Coyle)
6. Building a Culture of Experimentation. It takes more than good tools. It takes a complete change of attitude. (Stefan Thomke)
Facilitate Success 