INTRODUCTION

WHY IS YOUR LEADER iD SO IMPORTANT?

When leaders develop a clear sense of their own identity, their organisation’s performance flourishes. Understanding who they are as a person enables them to succeed in the role of ‘leader’. Gaining clarity about their sense of self gives them a greater sense of confidence in their own ability to deliver effective leadership and – without fail – they go on to lead well.

Leading well delivers benefits to their colleagues, boss, key stakeholders and customers. It enables their organisation to continue to meet challenges. This is what we want for you.

Less than two-thirds of CEOs in a recent survey felt senior leaders in their organisations were well placed to meet future business challenges. HR directors in the same study felt that only 18% of senior leaders were ‘highly capable’. Studies such as these, of which there are many, suggest an oncoming leadership crisis. Well-developed leaders, who are clear and who can flex their approach to suit the challenges they face, will be critical to the future success of any organisation and society.

We have used the principles underpinning Leader iD to coach hundreds of senior leaders who have grown to excel at leading over the last 20 years.

Now you can use them too.

WHY HAVE WE WRITTEN LEADER iD NOW?

In our careers as leadership consultants and coaches, we have had the pleasure of working with hundreds of senior leaders and their teams. We have worked with them to achieve goals and challenges and helped many to overcome obstacles and thrive. Yet, particularly recently, we have noticed the relentless pace of organisational change and its direct impacts on many leaders. In the turmoil of day-to-day delivery, leadership gets put on the backburner. Tasks get ticked off on a ‘to do list’ but real change is seldom well-led and people are rarely developed and challenged as they might be. Many senior leaders do not want to become very senior leaders, preferring to remain where they are, for fear of getting overwhelmed by the relentless organisational machine.

In short, many leaders find themselves lost. They don’t know what to focus on and they have little sense of themselves as key players in the success of the organisation.

We wanted to take our experiences and share them with you so you can rediscover the clarity you need to become an outstanding leader, even in these most uncertain times.

If you couple this sense of feeling lost with the fact that many organisations are investing less in helping leaders develop – or worse, spending it on outmoded and ineffective development interventions – it is no surprise that CEOs and HR directors have little confidence in their senior leaders to lead. The specialised nature of the work we do means that, whilst we have helped many leaders, we’re aware that we could help so many more.

Leader iD is the platform for us to contribute to a much larger leadership community than our direct work allows.

This book is our lifeline to busy, unsettled leaders like you, who are eager to develop and who are convinced they can lead more effectively. We want to help you shape your leadership identity and re-ignite the original motivation you had for signing on the dotted line when someone at some moment in the past said to you: ‘We want you to lead.’

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE AN EFFECTIVE LEADER IN TODAY’S WORLD OF WORK?

Today’s workplaces are incredible structures. Not only the physical buildings and products and services, but the innovative business models too, adopted across all sectors. Silos and functions are disappearing. Project teams, virtual teams and disparate workers are emerging. Turgid meeting rooms and low-energy sit-downs are being scrapped, whilst standing desks and standing meetings are being introduced. Offices are being dismantled, and pods and open spaces are engineered to replace them. Technology has substituted much human interaction too. Whilst some important things have been lost with the advent of so much technology, when implemented well, it has revolutionised how we work. Agile working, lean methodologies and rapid prototyping are all new approaches to work and innovation.

Each and every one of these changes produces one common effect: increased pace. In today’s workplace, speed is all.

It is in this context that leaders have to do their work. Well-equipped leaders will thrive. Leaders that haven’t grown and adapted to the new reality will get left further and further behind, even more quickly than their forebears did in the 1980s to 2000s.

Leaders need a new guide on how to lead in this ‘new normal’. Leader iD is that guide. It provides help and advice on how to ‘be’ a highly effective leader and how to ‘do’ highly effective leadership both today and into the future.

For leaders to succeed in this new reality, they will need to be:

• comfortable with ambiguity
• flexible in their thinking
• able to focus on the uniqueness not only of situations but of people
• open to a wide range of diverse views that will challenge the very bedrock of long-held truths, values and beliefs.

The new world of work also requires a new kind of confidence. Such confidence will not come from being a subject expert. It will come from self-awareness and belief in your own abilities to succeed in challenging situations. Leaders particularly need a healthy dose of self-efficacy: they need to believe that their behaviours and actions are responsible for successful outcomes.

Think of it as a kind of faith in yourself. High self-efficacy has positive impacts on the tasks we will undertake, how we undertake them, how long we will endure and how we review our efforts. Leaders with high self-efficacy seek out leadership roles more than those with lower self-efficacy and, all things being equal, they lead more effectively. Importantly, self-efficacy grows with an increasingly clear sense of yourself.

Whilst adapting, flexing and role-modelling, a leader in today’s workplace also needs to be developing themself as well as others. Failure to change personally is not an option. Neither is failure to grow the members of their team, their peers and pretty much anyone else they encounter on a daily basis. Developing others using a well-intentioned cookie-cutter approach is not acceptable either. Leaders need to appreciate the uniqueness of each individual they work with and adapt their style accordingly. This is particularly important with the rapidly changing nature of the workforce.

Millennials will make up 75% of the workforce by 2028. Even if, like us, you don’t sign up to the idea of identifying an entire generation born between about 1985 and 2000 with a set of universal drivers, desires and dreams, it is clear that there is a changing expectation around what life and work should be like. If you lead others, you will need to respond to these changing expectations and the high performance standards that will be set for you and your team. To achieve organisational success, the first area of focus for development and growth may well be on yourself.

HOW IS THIS BOOK GOING TO HELP YOU AS A LEADER?

Busy leaders face several challenges when it comes to developing themselves, including the following:

• Organisations are often unwilling to invest in development.
• Development typically is delivered at set times rather than when you need it.
• Organisations typically use a one-size-fits-all approach to developing unique human beings.
• Development programmes often lack the mechanisms for benchmarking where you are now.
• Development programmes even more frequently lack a mechanism for providing evidence of your progress.

Self-awareness is so important for development both from day to day and in the much longer term. Deepening your own self-awareness is crucial for your development but it is also a key ingredient for working with and developing others. The beauty of Leader iD is that you will develop your own levels of self-awareness through using our diagnostic tool and working your way through the accompanying chapters.

Once you have completed your Leader iD profile, you can prioritise and tailor your learning. This allows you to maximise the progress you achieve in the most efficient way. Typically, book-based development fails to provide individualised learning. Thankfully, Leader iD overcomes that common pitfall by providing you with your own benchmark, a map of how to progress and a rich set of resources for successful improvement.

HOW THE LEADER iD MODEL WORKS AND HOW IT HELPS LEADERS THRIVE

Let’s use a familiar metaphor to help explain the Leader iD model: the many-layered and humble onion.

The CORE layer of the Leader iD model represents you. It denotes who you are as a person – your very ‘self’. The next layer is the set of skills you display as a leader. The most effective group of these skills for you to master is called ‘Developmental leadership skills’. The outer layer represents how the combination of your CORE and developmental leadership skills positively impact ‘Performance’. There is no point working on your Leader iD if it fails to improve your own performance, that of your team and of your business.

You, your leadership and the resulting performance don’t occur in a vacuum. They happen inside a context. The size and scope of that context depend on innumerable factors. The important thing to remember here is that you are connected to a wider system within which you lead. There is a two-way dynamic relationship between you, your leadership and the context within which you find yourself.

There is another way of interpreting the model: from outside to inside. Typically, we start from the inside and work outwards but it can be helpful, on occasion, to start at the very outside of the model at the ‘Working context’ and work inwards.

Developing skills and personal traits is hard to do in isolation. Learning is even harder to achieve whilst failing to recognise the context in which leadership is executed. Reflecting on the model from the ‘Working context’ through ‘Performance’ and ‘Developmental leadership skills’ to ‘CORE’ highlights the impacts of the context in which you lead on each of the other layers of the model. Furthermore, it demonstrates the inter-dependent nature of the elements of a leader’s identity.

Keep in mind the performance you need to deliver as a leader, as well as the context you are working within, as we offer you the chance to take your Leader iD diagnostic.

HOW TO READ LEADER iD

In Part 1 you will complete your Leader iD profile. Once you have that, you are free to move through the rest of the book as suits your particular situation. More about why you may not want to move through the book from page to page soon, but first let us explain how Parts 2, 3 and 4 pan out.

Part 2 focuses on identity, with a chapter dedicated to each of the elements of identity that we use in our model: compassion, discovery, perspective, determination and balance.

Part 3 focuses on leadership, with a chapter dedicated to each of the developmental excellences we use in our model: embodying excellence, advocating excellence, appreciating excellence and developing excellence.

Part 4 provides you with three tools that will help you to put all you have learnt into practice.

Each chapter within Parts 2 and 3 includes insights. Each insight is aligned to the individual questions set within the Leader iD profiling tool and accompanied by a wealth of tips, exercises and reflections. The intention is for you to draw from the chapters according to your personal Leader iD. You can focus on the areas you need to in the order you want to and you can do so as specifically or as generally as you wish.

Let’s briefly look at an example. If, generally, you didn’t score well in, let’s say, compassion, then read the whole chapter covering compassion and complete all the learning and development activities. On the other hand, if you scored ok in compassion generally, other than in one very specific area, you can go to the specific insight and concentrate on that. The format of the book allows great flexibility in how you shape your development and also enables you to target exactly how you spend your leadership development time.

The insights contained within each chapter have been linked to real-world actions, changes to your thinking, well-tested advice and reflective coaching questions. In our experience, these insights bring about real and lasting change for leaders. Just reading them may produce some differences for you, but real success is possible only if you are willing to take the required steps, every day, to ensure that the development you are looking for is achieved and that the changes you make actually stick.