Tag: conscious capitalism

Next Steps: How to Achieve an Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy: leaders on the starting line

In a previous article, I discussed the benefits of an advanced coaching leadership strategy. Now, let’s take it to the next level and examine how to achieve an advanced coaching leadership strategy.

Take the time to truly understand the gaps

Every company is in a different situation with different challenges. Even so, the first step for any company should be to consciously understand where they are, where they need to go, and how to fill the gap between the two. The best way to start this process is to run diagnostics, examining two dimensions:

  • First, stop the never-ending intellectual discussion about your company culture and measure it. I have worked with different culture assessment tools and the top one I recommend is the OCI® (Organizational Culture Inventory) from Human Synergistics. In my experience, companies can spend months and years talking about their need for cultural transformation without reaching any actionable conclusion and results. Using a culture assessment tool allows you and your team to clearly understand the desired culture, speak a common “culture language,” and measure concrete gaps to fill.
  • In parallel, individual and team leadership assessments and transformations are a key part of the process. We all know that the number one influencer of a company’s culture is its leaders’ behaviors and mental models. There are several excellent individual and team assessment tools, and the one I would recommend for transforming a leadership culture is the LSI® (Life Style Inventory), also from Human Synergistics. It allows you to make the connections between your desired culture and your individual and collective leadership transformation. It is then easy and straight forward to make the connection between the 12 leadership styles measured by the LSI® and the mindsets and behaviors corresponding to the “Command & Control” as well as the “Advanced Coaching” Leadership strategies.

Next Steps: How to Achieve an Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy: leaders on the starting line

Then take action

After completing the diagnostic phase, along with the accompanying debrief sessions about your results, it’s time to take action. First, I recommend taking your team on a strategic off-site workshop to define your leadership culture transformation needs and goals. Use a “From-To” analysis, driven by a solid business case for change.
From this concrete exercise, the executive committee can formalize a kind of “Manifesto.” It will summarize the commitments in terms of mindsets and behaviors that the members agree to. They will need to adopt them individually and collectively, role modeling the desired culture and its impact on the company’s strategic success.
The next step is about empowering the executive committee to walk the talk. In my opinion, the best way of achieving this is through individual and team coaching. They will build a leadership culture and cascade it progressively to the next levels, the executive team leading by example. This has been proven to be the most concrete and effective way to transform a company’s culture quickly.
However, leaders’ (of all levels) mindsets and behaviors are not the only drivers of culture. In parallel, the company will need to align the company, business, and people systems/policies/processes and symbols to the desired culture.

Conclusion

Moving from a Command & Control to an Advanced Coaching Leadership style is part of a business strategy that focuses on the decentralization of decision, control, and accountability by engaging and empowering employees.
Doing this will lead to the transformation of your organizational culture.
In a VUCA world, you can’t afford to wait half a decade to achieve such a culture shift.

Next Steps: How to Achieve an Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy
climbing helping team work , success concept

An interview with Thierry de Beyssac
More and more in today’s business world, we see the traditional “command and control”  leadership style isn’t working. In this interview with Axialent consultant Thierry de Beyssac, he shares his thoughts about the need to embrace new strategies and skills in order to be successful leaders in today’s fast-changing environment and the benefits of an Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy.

First, can you tell us what the Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy is?

Advanced Coaching Leadership is a kind of culture and strategy. It focuses on the decentralization of decision making, reduction of control, and increase of accountability by engaging and empowering people, thus liberating an agile organization and embracing four of the six “Harvard Leadership Styles”[1].

In case some of our readers are not clear on what the six “Harvard Leadership Styles” are, can you describe them for us?

The Harvard Leadership Styles, first developed by David Goleman and published in the Harvard Business Review, describes both negative and positive leadership styles:

  1. Coercive: The “Do what I tell you” style demands immediate compliance.
  2. Pacesetting: The “Do as I do, now!” style sets extremely high standards for performance.
  3. Coaching: The “Try this” style makes people accountable and helps them find their own way to succeed.
  4. Democratic: The “What do you think?” style builds trust and commitment through participation.
  5. Affiliative: The “People come first” style creates harmony & meaning and builds emotional bonds with employees.
  6. Authoritative: The “Come and do with me” style aligns and empowers around an inspiring vision.

Which of the Harvard Leadership Styles does a “command and control” leader use?

The Benefits of an Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy: team working together to reach the top of the mountain
The command and control style leader uses coercion when setting tasks and demands that employees do as they do, “now.” They set extremely high standards for performance. This controlled, centralized decision making and solution giving fosters authoritarian micromanagement. It creates and feeds into a competitive and perfectionistic culture where employees fear failure and blame others.

And what are the traits of a leader following the Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy?

A leader following the Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy (ACLS) decentralizes decisions and control, prioritizes accountability, achievement, and agility. This type of leader creates conditions for others to succeed. Instead of authoritarian, an ACLS leader will be authoritative within a clear collective vision and sense of purpose. He/she will allow for personal growth, self fulfillment, and the realization of self and employee potential. This creates a culture where feedback flourishes.

In what kind of business environment does this style work best?

The Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy is imperative for large, complex, multi-generational, and global organizations. It creates an interconnected diverse workforce and collaborative models, which allows for an openness to company-wide culture transformation.

How does ACLS translate into the culture of an organization?

Traditional hierarchical leadership cultures tend to have centralized structures with top-down communication and micro-managing (“my truth is THE truth” leaders). In contrast, the ACLS supports cultures to have a decentralized and “collegial” governance model, with visionary leaders who empower others. ACLS leaders understand that coaching employees to grow their skills is a way to engage with them to take accountability, give the best of themselves, achieve challenging objectives, and will lead to successful teamwork.

Advanced Coaching Leadership sounds quite challenging. What kinds of mindsets and competencies are required for the ACLS?

Self-awareness and creativity are key; an ACLS leader must be able to foster collective intelligence, collective creativity, and collective accountability. They will also need an unconditional responsibility mindset: the Player vs. Victim posture. They will be able to admit that, as a leader, you cannot know it all, see it all, nor be right and creative all the time. It is key to have this Learner posture, to foster a permanent two-way feedback culture and be able to delegate.
Harvard research has shown that the best leaders master the following four, or more, of the Harvard Leadership Styles: Coaching, Democratic, Affiliative, Authoritative. These leaders run companies with decentralized and empowered cultures. They achieve high people engagement and build a strong culture of consciousness of self (mindfulness): self-awareness, self-development, unconditional responsibility, ontological humility, sense of purpose and self-actualization.

Are there any situations where the other 2 Harvard Leadership Styles work for an organization?

The Harvard research found that Coercive and Pacesetting leaders can be effective in some crisis or severe turnaround situations when combined with the other 4 leadership styles. However, these two leadership strategies have the most negative impact on the 6 effective organizational culture components (Flexibility, Responsibility, Standards, Rewards, Clarity, Commitment).
Although the Coercive and Pacesetting styles can create short term gain, ACLS leaders understand that short-term failure can further long-term learning and winning (e.g. Design Thinking kind of innovation).

You have talked a lot about the pros of ALCS, are there any downsides?

Leading a business using the ACLS requires well-trained, versatile leaders willing to use these leadership styles while facing the high pressure of the “get it done now” economy. As I mentioned just now, there will be some moments when it is necessary to understand that short-term failure can further long-term learning and winning. Developing people is often seen as too time-consuming and resource-draining, so ACLS demands a strong leader who is willing to free up time for people management. This kind of leader needs to be willing to make a short-term time and resource investment while looking at the long-term gain.

So, in the end, what you are recommending is a change of culture. What would you recommend to a leader interested in this kind of leadership and culture?

I would say, don’t talk about it and don’t “do” it… measure it, own it, and be it.
Culture is the messages that people receive about how they are expected to think, act, and interact in order to fit in at a given organization. It’s that simple, that foundational.
The “Command & Control” leadership mindsets and behaviors tell you a lot about how you are expected to think, act, and interact. The Advanced Coaching Leadership Strategy does too… albeit in a very different way.
[1] https://hbr.org/2000/03/leadership-that-gets-results

Two superheroes are ready to save the world from evil and tyranny.

A take on resilience

There are several definitions of resilience out there. The simplest one I found is that it is the ability to rise again after we fall. And we will fall. One of my favorite humans, Brené Brown, claims that if we are brave enough, often enough, we will fall. I find this hard to come to terms with. If you’ve tried to avoid falling as hard as I’ve tried, and the pandemic has brought you, your team or your business (or all three), to the edge of a cliff or over it – then you might want to read on.  The need to be building courage and resilience in times of uncertainty is stronger than ever.
I would like to look at resilience under a different lens. As a lover of metaphors, I prefer this definition from Cambridge Dictionary:  the ability of a substance to return to its usual shape after being bent, stretched or pressed.
What is our ‘usual shape?’ For me, it’s a triangle. At Axialent we depict the key to sustainable, extraordinary results through a triangle. I don’t think it’s by chance. The triangle is the only polygon that preserves its nature even when it is bent, stretched or pressed. In construction, it is the strongest shape.

The 3 dimensions of resilience

Building Courage and Resilience in Times of Uncertainty: Axialent's 3 dimensions of success
Each point of this triangle represents one of three dimensions of success, and I believe they serve as waypoints on the road to resilience.

  • The ‘It’ dimension represents the task. It is the business results, such as profitability, revenue or market share. The ‘It’ is a prerequisite for survival of any business.
  • Companies achieve results through the contribution of their people. The ‘I’ dimension reminds us that individuals need to be at their best to contribute to a firm’s success. As obvious as this may sound, our experience is that this dimension is often neglected during ‘business as usual.’
  • Just as important as individual wellbeing and engagement is the ‘We’ dimension. How groups collaborate, work as teams and foster healthy interpersonal relationships are also at the heart of a company’s success.

The pandemic has stretched this triangle for many organizations. In the past months, the ‘It’ was hijacked by what I consider a ‘hyper-VUCA’ situation. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity have stretched their bounds. And in the midst of that, the ‘I’ came into the foreground. We’ve all witnessed companies putting the safety and the health of their people – workers, customers, and business partners – first. Although it may seem that they had no choice, this was a choice.
Covid-19 brought a hunger and thirst to connect. The lockdown made us rename ‘social distancing’ to ‘physical distancing’. No way was a virus going to sever human connection. Clients have approached us seeking our advice on how to build healthy connection at a distance, because the spontaneous reaction had turned Zoom-fatigue into a ‘thing’.
This pandemic is also causing undeniable economic turmoil. Figuring out what the new normal will look like is taking up business leaders’ bandwidth today, as they learn to become ambidextrous if they aren’t already: one hand on the short-term survival gear, and the other on the medium-term headlight switches.
Building Courage and Resilience in Times of Uncertainty: Resilient kids

Building Courage and Resilience in Times of Uncertainty

If there is no guarantee as to what the new normal is going to be and the only guarantee is that if we show up courageously in life and in business we will fall, then how can we build the courage to step into this challenge? For me, the answer is by learning to recover the triangle.

  1. On the ‘I’ dimension, first grant yourself permission to not be okay – and then do something about it. I invite you to think of your wellbeing as a responsibility to yourself and to others. Take care of yourself first, so you can be of service to yourself and others. The recommendation to don your own oxygen mask before assisting others who need your help is the perfect example of this.
  2. On the ‘We’ dimension, avoid the pendulum effect. From zero connection to never-ending conference calls and back, neither extremes are sustainable. Consider setting an intention of how you will connect with the people you care about, including colleagues that you used to bump into around the office that you no longer interact with. Tap into your reservoir of creativity to think of other channels of communication. Don’t just default to back-to-back calls.
  3. On the ‘It’ dimension, what if you choose the new normal that you want to see emerge? The one that inspires you to do great things in the world through your business. I encourage you to focus on the handful of things you can do in order to achieve that. It makes me feel more empowered, and it might just do the same for you. I believe it is far more effective than dwelling in helplessness waiting for the new normal to ‘happen to me’.

Conclusion

This is not a matter of balance. It’s not 33.33 period % of each. This is a matter of harmony. You will have built resilience when, at any time this triangle is bent, or stretched, or pressed – you still find a way to recover the triangle you want for yourself, your relationships and your business.

We recently attended the Conscious Capitalism European Conference in Barcelona, Spain—an event attended by 300 leaders and practitioners.
Conscious Capitalism is a way of thinking about capitalism and business that better reflects where we are in the human journey, the state of our world today, and the innate potential of business to make a positive impact on the world. Conscious businesses are galvanized by higher purposes that serve, align and integrate the interests of all their major stakeholders.
The four principles of Conscious Capitalism are very closely aligned with Axialent’s purpose as an organization.

Here are our key takeaways from the event.

  1. If we’re not healing, we’re harming.

In his speech, Raj Sisodia explained that we need to have an active role in making the world a more conscious, caring and compassionate place, and it is critical that we work toward doing business in the right way…good business. By this, we mean that businesses need to think about their customers, products and services, and consider all the aspects including the impact (direct or indirect) their actions have on their employees, suppliers, people who are not their customers, the environment and, yes, also revenue. If we don’t do this, we are contributing to more suffering, and that means we are harming. At Axialent, we work every day to heal organizations by bringing more consciousness and working at the I, We and It levels.
 

  1. If you believe in something, you can do it no matter what. The road will be tough; but if your belief is strong enough, you will find a way to keep going.

Ibukun Awosika, chairwoman of the First Bank of Nigeria, delivered an inspiring keynote about the complexities and obstacles that the African countries have. She also described some interesting aspects of the African society that few people are aware of, for instance, the way they behave as a community and how they care for each other. The biggest takeaway is the way she is as a human being. Despite all the challenges she has back home, she was there “fighting” for what she believed in and forging the change—spreading the message and walking the talk.
 

  1. “Call your heroes and share your gratitude and admiration with them.”

This is a quote from Tom Gardner’s speech, where he mentioned a number of “recommendations” based on his 25 years as the co-founder of The Motley Fool. One recommendation he has is to call or write to all the people you admire and let them know how inspiring they are for you or your organization and how grateful you are for what they are doing and the way they are impacting the world—and to spread gratitude and admiration because it feels good and not expect an answer from those you reach out to.
 

  1. There’s an alternative to a hierarchical mindset!

This is a very strong belief a lot of organizations and leaders hold. Having to rely on, at some point, a hierarchical structure is so embedded in modern-day business. Brian Robertson, the creator of Holacracy, shared that organizations can work as living cells; there’s no CEO cell or VP cell. The principle of this alternative way of working is that we work on having the purpose of our role and organization in mind, but we are the CEOs of our role and we can do whatever we may need to solve and start new things. Unless there’s a rule written against that, we can do whatever we may think is better to serve the purpose of the company. It is really encouraging to know that many companies are implementing Holacracy and thriving. Zappos, one of the biggest online shoe and clothing retailers in the U.S., adopted this new system and is an example of its success.