How it works

The Stretch Leadership^TM Model shares four essential productive habits you can purposefully embed into your behaviour to translate your “leadership edge” into success. Your leadership edge is derived from the unique and powerful strengths and qualities you bring to the way you lead. Once discovered and activated, your leadership edge inspires those around you to perform at their best and achieve exceptional results.

Your leadership edge has four aspects:

1. Aspirations – what you aspire to achieve through your leadership and contribution; the lasting legacy you wish to leave
2. Values – your principles and guiding beliefs that are important to you and anchor your career and life decisions
3. Strengths – underlying qualities that energize us and we are great at (or have potential to become great at)
4. Abilities – natural or acquired talents and skills where you have an opportunity to shine.

Understanding your leadership edge is the first step in the journey to great leadership. Self-awareness must be followed by a period of stretch. The most effective leaders are masters at the art and science of stretch. They never stand still and they adopt four Stretch Leadership™ Habits – Sharing Vision, Sparking Engagement, Skilfully Executing, and Sustaining Progress. They push the boundaries of thinking and possibility, looking for new and innovative ways of doing things to achieve the organization's goals, whilst advancing their own career. In doing so, they create: a clear sense of Purpose; a Passionate and engaged workforce; clear, scalable Processes; and a culture of peak Performance and continuous improvement.

A guideline for strengthening your leadership

1. Clarify your leadership aspirations and how these relate to the organization's vision: What will it look like when you are successful? What does success mean to you? To what extent are your aspirations aligned with your personal values?
2. Discover your unique strengths using a strengths profiler like Strengthscope360™ or StrengthscopeLeader™.
3. Invite feedback from co-workers and family members who know you best on when they have seen you at your most energized and performing particularly well. This will help provide clarity on how you can bring the best of yourself to your leadership.
4. Through experience, engaging with others and education, build your skill and competence in areas of your greatest strength. Try to find leadership opportunities that match these areas.
5. Actively and consistently practise the four leadership habits by defining development goals that help you further improve those you already do well, whilst also supporting improvements in those that do not come naturally to you.

Downloadable tools available at www.strengthscope.com/ resources/leadership-tools/:

• Clarifying your picture of success and priorities
• Leadership success through strengths

How it works

Every day, all of us face challenges and opportunities. For leaders, choosing how to respond in any given situation provides a “moment of truth”. Such “moments of truth” determine a leader's effectiveness and their impact on individuals, teams and the organization.

Most leaders, find themselves alternating between the two paths outlined in the following figure. Their assumptions, beliefs and interpretation of a situation place them at some point on either path and directly influence how they react to their circumstances. Other leaders have a tendency to stay more on one path than the other, based on habitual ways of thinking.

The lower path, the Path of Limitation, drives thought and actions narrowed by a negative mindset that focuses on problems, issues, failures, weaknesses and independent action. It results in fear, mistrust and pessimism. This in turn fuels a culture of learned helplessness where individuals and teams feel isolated and unable to progress. This self-doubt leads to lower performance and undesirable and unintended consequences, such as missing business targets.

The upper path, the Path of Possibility, is more productive. Thoughts and actions are broadened and focused on strengths, successes, opportunities, solutions and building collaborative partnerships. Leadership is based on trust, hope, optimism, purpose and energy-boosting habits. This leads to a sense of powerfulness, positive energy, confidence and meaning at work, which fuels higher performance.

It is important to understand where you are at any point in time, and to understand the implications of your mindset on your performance and that of others who you work with. Identifying those triggers that move you to any stage of the Path of Limitation will enable you to recalibrate, change course and stay on the performance-enhancing Path of Possibility.

Guidelines to strengthen your leadership

1. Continuously and consistently draw on your self-awareness to identify the risks of staying on the Path of Limitation. Identify those triggers that push you onto the Path of Limitation and be clear on the action you will take to move back to the positive mindset of leadership.
2. Call on your strengths and those of your co-workers and stakeholders to shift gears and adopt a more positive outlook.
3. Act using the POINT (Pluses, Opportunities, Issues, New Thinking) method when facing tough challenges or problems. Remember the pluses and opportunities associated with the problem, rather than becoming overwhelmed with the issues. Only then, clarify the issues and develop new thinking with your co-workers to tackle these issues.
4. If your leadership style draws on the strength of critical thinking, which, when used in overdrive, can result in a pessimistic overcritical standpoint, ensure you moderate by, for example, calling on someone strong on optimism, enthusiasm or creativity.
5. Start each workday with the most energizing tasks. This will kick-start a positive mindset and increase the likelihood of moving to and staying on the Path of Possibility. Delegate energy-draining tasks where possible. Where not possible, do not procrastinate. To avoid remaining on the Path of Limitation due to lack of energy, “start by starting”.

Downloadable tool available at www.strengthscope.com/resources/ leadership-tools/:

• Maintaining a positive leadership mindset

How it works

In Asian philosophy, the concept of Yin Yang is used to describe how seemingly opposite forces are interconnected and interdependent in nature.

The central idea is that Yin Yang are not opposing forces, but complementary opposites that interact within a greater whole to give it strength and balance.

Similarly, we believe that leadership development during one's career is about balancing two opposite and interdependent dualities – optimizing strengths and reducing the effect of performance risks, including weaknesses.

Prior to the strengths-based approach to leadership development, the emphasis on employee development in most organizations was principally centred on overcoming deficits or weaknesses. A compelling body of evidence over the past two decades shows the limitations of focusing on resolving weaknesses, an approach that tends to undermine engagement, performance and confidence. Strengths practitioners recommend moving away from this deficit-oriented approach towards an approach that is focused on leaders' and employees' strengths, helping them use these to maximize performance outcomes. However, weaknesses and other performance risks should not be ignored.

Achieving success comes from ensuring a fine balance between optimizing individual and team strengths and reducing risks to performance, which we define as limiting weaknesses (as opposed to allowable weaknesses), overdone strengths (strengths that are used in the wrong way and cause unintended negative performance outcomes) and other blockers or sources of “interference”, such as self-limiting assumptions and beliefs. Only by understanding and engaging with these dynamic and complementary development forces will you be able to unlock the full potential and energy of your leadership and your team.

Guidelines to strengthen your leadership

1. Adopt the 80–20 rule in your personal development: spend 80% of your development time discovering and building on your strengths with the remainder allocated to overcoming risk areas, specifically limiting weaknesses and overdone strengths.
2. Build productive habits around areas of strength, skill and experience; practise these in different situations, including unfamiliar ones, until you've mastered them.
3. Don't ignore risk areas to your performance. Uncover limiting weaknesses, overdone strengths and psychological sources of interference interfering with peak performance. Identify strategies to reduce these risks by: using strengths you do have; calling on your co-workers' strengths; and through deliberate practice to acquire new habits when these are unnatural for you.
4. Ensure your manager knows your strengths and performance risks. Invite him/her, as well as other colleagues and your wider personal network, to support you in optimizing your strengths and reducing your performance risks to accelerate your career success.
5. Apply the 70–20–10 rule when planning your development: spend roughly 70% of your time on on-the-job learning, 20% on engaging others to help you and 10% on education and formal learning. Remember that becoming a more effective leader involves continuous learning.

Downloadable tool available at www.strengthscope.com/resources/leadership-tools/:

• Optimizing leadership strengths, reducing risks

How it works

To be authentic and credible, leaders develop good self-awareness and make the most of who they are at their best. This process starts with you identifying your “leadership edge”, covered in section 1.1 above. Next, transforming your leadership edge into your “leadership brand” enables you to communicate your value to others in a natural way, without it feeling forced or “salesy”. Your leadership brand is what you want others to be saying about you when you're not around.

There are four main aspects that make up your leadership brand: values, strengths, proposition and essence. Building your leadership brand and communicating it to others helps you to:

1. Differentiate yourself in highly competitive internal and external marketplaces
2. Increase your visibility in the company and make others aware of your presence
3. Ensure people have a clear sense of who you are and how to work with you
4. Become more self-confident and self-motivated as you gain further self-awareness on what you have to offer your team and the wider organization.

Strong leadership brands are not built overnight; they take a long time to evolve. They change over time too. It's worth the effort though. As with strong product brands, strong personal brands produce top results, such as improvements in demand, perceived value, reputation and results.

Guidelines to strengthen your leadership

1. When developing your brand, start with the base layer of the pyramid and identify your values – what you see as important principles in your life or standards that you follow. Build on these by next including your core strengths and skills (those things that energize you and that you are skilled at using). Think of these two levels as your “features” – important points of differentiation for you as a leader.
2. Next, develop the top two layers of the pyramid: your proposition (the value you bring to your organization); and your essence (why others would follow you or want to work with you as a leader). Focus here on summarizing and on using the language of “benefits”, that is, the benefits that your leadership can bring to a project, team or organization. Remember to use language that would be natural for you to say out loud, perhaps in a job interview or when introducing yourself to a new team or boss.
3. After completing your brand, test it out on those around you who are supporting your development, such as your mentor, coach and manager, as well as trusted partners and friends outside of your work environment. Ask for feedback on what they are hearing: Is your brand clear? Does it reflect how they see you? What changes would they make to ensure your brand is more impactful and reflective of you at your very best?
4. Ensure your actions, words and leadership approach are consistent with your brand. Leaders who are consistent in their approach and who live their brands on a day-to-day basis are more trusted and respected than those who lack this consistency. Practise what you preach, be what you say you are, do what you say you will do.
5. When dealing with your manager, team and other stakeholders, find ways to communicate your brand and what you stand for, to help people know what to expect from you and what you expect from them. Invite regular feedback to check whether you are acting in line with your brand.

Downloadable tool available at www.strengthscope.com/resources/ leadership-tools/:

• Your leadership brand

How it works

The most effective leaders positively stretch themselves, their people and the organization at multiple levels. They push the boundaries of thinking and possibility, looking for innovative ways of achieving the organization's goals, whilst strengthening their own leadership and learning.

In order to stretch yourself positively, the first step is to understand the extent to which your leadership activities/tasks are currently challenging you. Your efforts can then focus on stretching in areas of strength (i.e. areas that naturally energize you and provide the greatest scope for challenge and growth), rather than areas of weakness. The aim is to move beyond your “Comfort Zone” (the zone where activities feel easy, straightforward and comfortable) and acquire new skills and experience to take your performance to the next level. The aim is to move into the “Stretch Zone” (where activities/tasks feel challenging and require you to operate at the limits of your skill, knowledge and expertise to deliver effective performance).

The key to achieving positive and healthy stretch is to ensure that you do not move into the “Panic Zone”. In this zone, you feel you haven't got the skills and experience to perform effectively. You feel out of your depth and negatively stressed. Like an Olympic athlete or virtuoso musician, the aim is to ensure you are continuously improving and delivering better results through growing in areas that already energize you.

Guidelines to strengthen your leadership

1. Identify areas of your leadership role where you think you are in the “Comfort Zone”. Discover opportunities to stretch yourself in these areas by taking on new tasks, learning new skills or adapting your strengths and skills to lead effectively in a totally different situation.
2. Identify areas of your leadership role where you are in the “Stretch Zone”. Ensure you have the relevant level of support and feedback to succeed in these areas and continue to seek feedback from others on your effectiveness.
3. Identify areas of your leadership role where you are in the “Panic Zone”. Talk to your manager about these areas to get some support, delegate to others, or reallocate these tasks, at the same time developing greater skill in appropriate areas.
4. Invite your manager, mentor and others supporting your development to help you explore stretch assignments/projects within and outside your role to positively stretch your leadership strengths and take them to the next level.
5. Don't fall into the trap of spending all your time undertaking challenging, stretching tasks and activities on your own. Identify others with different strengths who can complement you and help you to deliver your leadership goals in smarter ways. Also, ensure that you spend sufficient time outside work doing relaxing and enjoyable activities and hobbies that recharge your batteries and ensure that you can sustain high levels of performance in the longer term.

Downloadable tool available at www.strengthscope.com/resources/ leadership-tools/:

• Finding positive stretch

How it works

The first step in managing the talent in your team is to choose the appropriate working style and approach that works best for each individual.

To understand the best approach to take, remember that employee contribution is a function of two variables – the person's Performance and the Passion (energy and commitment) they have for their work. If we plot performance on the X axis and passion for work on the Y axis, we can identify five different talent categories:

1. Vital talent (your star performers, who will help your team to outperform)
2. Disengaged performers (your rising stars, who, if engaged, will also help your team to outperform)
3. Steady contributors (your “hidden heroes”, who, with a little encouragement, could raise their game and your team's results)
4. Engaged underperformers (the toughest to manage as they are committed to the job and company, yet their performance is below the required standard)
5. Disengaged underperformers (your most challenging team members, who need help to engage with and perform their work, or to move on to something new)

Tips to strengthen your leadership

1. Look after your vital talent by ensuring they receive strong recognition through providing challenging stretch assignments and highly visible, fast-track projects/assignments. Coach and develop these individuals to optimize their potential.
2. Work with disengaged performers to uncover the reason for the low energy and passion. This may be work-related (e.g., lack of challenge) or personal (e.g., relationship issues). Coach and support them back to high engagement.
3. Don't ignore your steady contributors. Ensure you provide them with strong recognition and challenge in areas of strength to help retain them and if they are capable and willing, coach them to move them into the vital talent category.
4. Set clear expectations for improvement to engaged underperformers. Provide coaching and skills training to build confidence and competence. Explore alternative roles where there might be a better person–role fit.
5. Don't shy away from dealing with disengaged underperformers in a fair and firm manner. Set clear expectations for improvement and put in place short-term objectives with regular review meetings to gauge progress. Explore redeployment opportunities into a role that more closely matches their strengths and skills. Manage them out with the help of HR if there is no improvement after a reasonable period.

Downloadable tool available at www.strengthscope.com/resources/leadership-tools/:

• Managing your talent