Courageous Leaders Blog

This is the first in a five blog-post series on a leadership development tool: The Leverage Cycle. Successfully transitioning from doing to managing.

One of the biggest learning curves in leader development is early on – when you’re first promoted from being a top performer in your particular area of skill to becoming a leader of a (hopefully) high performing team.

In business leadership, often the reason for promotion is because you were good at what you did – delivering. This then translates into therefore you will be good at managing others to also deliver – which can be easier said than done!

If you’re struggling to let go of the control you had over ‘delivering’, struggling to trust that your team members will produce to the high level of quality that you did and that you expect, using the tools of the Leverage Cycle with discipline will help you develop your leadership skills and transition from doing to managing.

The Leverage Cycle proposes that leaders must use conversation to create an engaged, high performance team. There are four types of conversation:

1.    Delegating
2.    Supporting
3.    Feedback
4.    Coaching

We will look at each conversation individually throughout this series, however the basics are:

Delegating: this is the most important step and affects the success of the future conversations. Delegation requires a solid process and strong task focus backed with clarity in delivery of the message – it needs clarity and rigour in three things:
-    Delegating mindset
-    Right person and right level
-    Right conversation
The success of future conversations depends on the delegation conversation, so it is worth spending time on it.

Supporting: this is the nurturing, engaging, regular check-in conversations to ensure your team members feel significant, supported and important. Because they are.

Feedback: both giving and receiving feedback is particularly important to ensure high performance. Remember that receiving feedback is not the same as accepting feedback – so those conversations need to occur to ensure changed behaviours where necessary.

Coaching: this conversation follows closely from feedback conversations. It’s about taking on the feedback that has been provided and acting on it to improve performance so when that team member is next delegated a task or project they carry it out better than they did (or could have) before.

Undertaking all four of these conversations regularly, diligently and with courage will mean even the newest business leader can expect a consistently high performance from their team.

 

Watch the first video of The Leverage Cycle series.

Facilitating a module in our leadership development program we started to compare business teams to sports teams. We explored the elements of a high performing team and moved on to what leaders needed to do to keep and maintain a team in this high performing space. I challenged that from my experience we get sports teams into the high performing space with much greater speed and effectiveness than business teams because we have a coach who is prepared to give very honest feedback. The coaches give this kind of feedback as they know this is the best way to shift the skills and attitude of each individual in the team with the greatest speed - and in sports teams you only have a season, and that is normally only a number of months! Leading the team into the high performing space for a sports coach takes great courage.

This moved the conversation to the role of the coach - because I claimed the coach in a sporting team is the leader of the team. Very quickly a participant disagreed claiming the coach is not on the field playing so how can they possibly be the leader of the team? This provoked insightful thought and conversation within the group.

A breakthrough in thinking erupted for everyone and I heard myself saying "absolutely that is exactly the point". The leader delegates and supports but they do not "play" - they do not go onto the field - what a great analogy! Thanks to the challenge from a participant we had a wonderful conversation and a breakthrough in thinking. Participants clearly understood how essential it is to let go of "doing" if you want to manage and lead a high performing team. This is an experience and conversation I plan to hold onto as I facilitate future programmes.

Reading this quote from Anais Nin created beautiful imagery:

" And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

In my experience of coaching many senior people aspiring to their penultimate career transition this is so true - it is time to break out and have the courage to be themselves. I recall one very senior existing leader describing himself as Mr Cellophane Man.......he had completely lost touch of who he was, what he stood for and how he wanted to be perceived in every role he undertook in life.

It takes great courage to discover who you are when you are being at your best and even more courage to stay true to this.

Many leaders keep their facades in place for far too long, losing their way or creating such tension in their lives that yes it becomes more painful to remain tight in the bud!

Taking the risk to blossom relieves the tension and empowers you to walk toward your future with passion and energy. Courageous leaders experience this because they discover themselves and importantly stay true to themselves.

To free up your time so you can invest more of it in leading you must let go of DOING – this is done by managing your leverage cycle.

What is your leverage cycle?
It starts with your delegating conversations, and is followed by ‘supporting’ conversations to achieve the results you need and expect. Upon completion of the task you engage in a feedback conversation and once the feedback is accepted this may lead to a coaching conversation.

Why increase the velocity?
Increase the velocity and veracity of these critical conversations:
•    Delegating
•    Supporting
•    Feedback
•    Coaching

And you enable higher quality outcomes in less time, greater productivity and improved profit margins. Ultimately you lead a high performing culture that enables financial, people and brand sustainability because these conversations show people you care enough about them and what they are doing.

I hear many leaders talk about the need to be ‘warm and fuzzy’ to be constructive in the new way of leading – internally I smile – because there is very little that is warm and fuzzy about engaging in leverage cycle conversations. They can be tough to bear, uncomfortable to initiate and challenging to prepare for!

Contact us if you want to receive our paper on the leverage cycle – really happy to share.