Is superhero leadership working for you?

Gone are the days of cast-in-stone 3-, 5- and 10-year strategic plans, precisely because we don’t know what the future looks like. 

Strategy practice is going through a period of foundational change. Now, solutions are more often to be found on the edges/fringes of everything you know, far from the centre of certainty.

Today, we need more sense-making leadership rather than superhero leadership, because one person is unlikely to be able to wave a magic wand with all the answers.

Sense-making requires many diverse voices in the room, asking different questions, and offering varied perspectives. This will likely result in the best guess in amongst various probabilities.

Two things must be nurtured and cultivated for sense-making:

• Trust in each other
• The ability to dialogue with each other

These are very human traits that you need to spend more time working on within your teams.

Experienced, intuitive, strategic facilitators (they are rare) are required for this kind of specialised and sensitive work to help people in the group to be comfortable with ‘not knowing’ and to trust one another without having all the answers.

This is a real leadership paradox; a massive shift away from leaders knowing all the answers as well as giving up the model of top-down, command-and-control.

This can make both leaders and team members feel at sea unless all the experience ‘in the room’ is harnessed and put to good use. This, in and of itself, can be incredibly exciting and full of unexpected opportunities.

While leadership used to be about leading others, self-leadership and self-regulation now play a much greater role in the way a leader leads their team today. Leadership is as much about self-leadership as it is about leading the team.

I specialise in this field and work with leaders on an invdividual basis, as well as in the group dynamic, because it has become ever more important for leaders to be curious about the patterns that script their responses and behaviour. These are often old, deeply ingrained, and you may not even be conscious that they are running the show.

These patterns/scripts direct a leader’s thinking and how they respond to others, as well as to the big threat in the room of ‘not knowing’ or not having all the answers.

Embrace and work with this line: ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. It is the doorway and catalyst to finding the answers that you seek in these times of uncertainty.

It’s fascinating work. It’s challenging work. It’s unpredictable work. It develops an unexpected life of its own. If you need help with this drop me a line at info@nikkibush.com

Have an empowered week.

Human Potential Expert