Maintain the Edge - Leadership Renewal

There are more pressures on leaders today than ever before to perform and ensure their teams are performing.  These expectations are often competing and therefore potentially depleting  making it more important than ever for leaders to take time out to look at renewing, grounding and energising themselves in their role as a leader.  Stephen R Covey’s highlights the need for renewal in his book ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ - ‘Sharpening the Saw – Principles of Balanced Self – Renewal’.

These same pressures on leaders can also lead to busyness that becomes a ‘badge of honour’ rather than stopping and taking stock of what is important.  Just ‘sawing’ isn’t enough to be an effective leader, taking time out to ‘sharpen’ the tools that you have to be an effective leader is essential (Covey).

Let’s explore four key principles towards leadership renewal. 

Keeping it Energized – these are the things that uplift you.  Energising practices are typically personal, things that you reflect on, your goals and passions.  Keeping it energised is to have a deep understanding of your centre and your purpose.  This is reviewing and living out your day in alignment to your goals and passions and to your core values.  When we get busy as leaders, this is often the one that we let go of first.  Taking regular time out to review what energises you and cultivate systems to build energy will assist you not drop the ball on this one. 

Keeping it Grounded - mindfulness starts with self-awareness, knowing yourself enables you to make choices about how you respond to people and situations.  A deep knowledge about yourself enables you to be consistent, to present yourself authentically.  Grounding allows you to notice the subtle clues that tell you to attend carefully to self, others or your surroundings.  A mentor that I have in business explains it to me that being grounded is like a balancing act - balancing our experiences with our purpose, our emotions.  This can also be framed as acceptance, instead of struggling with certain thoughts and feelings accept and acknowledge this is how I'm feeling without the need to act. 

Keeping it Real – This one is real simple yet one that we can easily push to the side due to being too busy.  Our bodies need certain things to function well.  What do we need to keep healthy to feed our body the right things it needs to function well in the other areas?  Exercise, relaxation, rest and food are all needed to help our bodies cope well with stress, to think clearly and keep focussed.  When it comes to keeping it real, we often see this as too hard as we may have to make some changes to our life.  There are some people that will jump into this one and do well to keep it a regular routine, others will jump in and will fade as things get busy.  If you think that’s you then start out by making incremental steps of change that can be maintained. Simple steps and simple changes maintained consistently over time lead to big benefits.  Keeping it real is very much about keeping this simple so that the daily practices we implement to keep healthy and well can be sustained over the long term. Keeping it real is really about self-leadership.  The things we do and hold ourselves accountable for our own well-being and maintenance. 

Keeping it Connected – Connection is about community and being in relationship with others.  However, connectedness in the context of renewal isn’t about connection with the people you lead. It is this about cultivating mutual connection with people that accept you for who you are, that speak into your life – it goes two ways.  For leaders this is about having good coaches and mentors that can help shape your leadership as you grow, that are not afraid to speak truth and keep you accountable as a leader.

A good friend of ours David Swift wrote a paper investigating the experience of current leaders in the disability field and what leaders needed to do to renew and sustain themselves.  His findings showed most importantly the interconnection of these principles is crucial for renewal.  Taking time out from leadership won’t give you the sort of renewal that you need to be a more effective leader.  However, attending to the responsibilities of your leadership, ensuring self-maintenance, growth and nurture will enable you to look continuously at investing in your renewal which will enable you to grow your effectiveness as a leader.

In leadership we can face mounting pressures, discouragement and loneliness. It comes with the territory. However, by taking time out for regular renewal, leadership effectiveness is not only maintained but growth and enjoyment whilst leading can be experienced.  Leading others is a privilege and it is a sacred trust to be able to bring influence into the life of another.  By actively cultivating daily practices of renewal your leadership and influence will be deep, long term and sustainable.

Ian and Marcia Watts 

Covey, R Stephen, “The 7 Habits of Highly effective People”, https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits.php 

Swift, David, 2004, “Renewal: A Picture of Current Strategies in leadership”.  http://www.cru.org.au/docs/OccasionalPapers/occasional.htm

Inclusive and planned approach to performance management = Engaged employees

Performance Management is a topic of focus at this time of year for many organisations as they close out the year and look forward to aligning their strategic plans with performance goals for 2013.    Many will start to develop and deploy key performance indicator’s (KPI’s) through their organisations and will believe that performance management is working towards having engaged employees who understand the company’s direction and what they need to do as individuals to achieve them.  However, this identifies a large gap of understanding within organisations and line managers who are defining performance management as the process of setting KPI’s and conducting performance reviews.

Performance management though is so much more than setting key performance indicators and conducting performance reviews (Millmore, Lewis, Saunders, Thornhill and Morrow 2007).  Defining performance management and its success is an ability to improve the performance of employees through developing teams and individuals, through an inclusive and planned approach. 

Human resource departments will be developing practices & tools for leaders to deploy to the business.  How these practises & tools are deployed by line managers is the most important factor in employee engagement and satisfaction within the company, even more so than the creation and design of HR practices by human resource management (Purcell & Hutchinson 2007).   The way HR practices are implemented by line managers determines the satisfaction of employees to understand the practices and take them on board.  Therefore, line managers have a crucial role in communicating the organisations direction, values and desired behaviours to employees (Purcell & Hutchinson 2007). 

Active engagement by line managers in the performance management process is required to ensure success.  Employees today are expecting more from their employers than just a job.  They are seeking a career and they want to understand what you as an employer will do to listen to their goals, help them build skills through different work experiences and allow them some freedom to discover and create choices.

 So what are some enablers to successful Performance Management?

1.      Engaging employees in the strategic direction through a team planning workshop with outcomes of how the team will work together to achieve results, as well how innovation initiatives can work towards the strategic direction i.e. look at what we do and how we do it, allowing the team some freedom to discover and create choices.

2.      Ask employees to draft individual goals and development plans and work with them on how they can best achieve these towards the company goals as well as meeting their individual needs.

3.      Regular and open dialogue around performance is required.  Performance Management is not a yearly one sided discussion about the employees’ performance. 

4.      Help employees build skills through different work experiences and allow them some freedom to discover and create choices that are aligned to the company strategic direction.

Ensuring the effectiveness of line manager’s role in the implementation of HR strategies requires all key stakeholders to clearly understand their role.   For line managers to succeed in their objectives, they need to understand the expectations upon them (Rappe & Zwick  2006).  Line managers need to understand that when there is no role clarity; job satisfaction suffers and can lead to intrapersonal tensions between HR, line managers and employees.   In order for HR activities to be embedded into the line manager responsibilities, a partnership ‘triad’ approach needs to exist between employees, line managers and HR, ensuring that there is a shared understanding of the different roles and responsibilities (Maxwell and Watson 2006).

What’s your company doing around performance management?  How will you keep your employees engaged in 2013?

Maxwell G.A and Watson S, 2006, ‘Perspectives on line managers in human resource management: Hilton International’s UK hotels’.  International Journal of Human Resource Management 17:6 June 2006 http//www.tandf.co.uk/journals

Millmore M, Lewis P, Saunders M, Thornhill A and Morrow T 2007,’Strategic Human Resource Management Contemporary Issues’ Pearson Education Limited

Purcell, J. & Hutchinson, S. (2007), ‘Front-line managers as agents in the HRM-peformance causal chain: theory, analysis and evidence’  Human Resource Management Journal, 17 (1), 3-20

Rappe C & Zwick T 2006, ‘Developing leadership competence of production unit managers’ Journal of Management Development, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 312-330 Emerald Group Publishing Limited