LEADERSHIP: THE POWER-DRESSING PARALLEL

Before I meddle with your mind, let me meddle with your wardrobe.  What are you wearing today?  And, why?  When dressing this morning, you probably had a choice in your closet: suits, casual stuff, even beach wear.  And, you made a selection.  Perhaps you thought: where am I going; and, how do I want to come across?  Appropriate dressing isn't a default action of grabbing the first thing you see.  And, effective leadership is similar.  Conscious choosing; not what worked in a different situation; or, what your boss used to do.  But what's right for leading your current people in their current situation.  So, why's that so difficult?

Leadership is about actions - things you do.  But, as in most things, it's better to think before you act.  In that sense, the most difficult part of leadership is the upfront problem-solving.  And, you need to keep on reviewing - and being flexible.  It's hard, adaptive work to keep finding the right actions so people stay on the journey with you - giving their all to achieve agreed outcomes.  And, the solution space is at the high-pressure juncture of top-down and bottom-up specifics that press in on you every day.  It looks (and feels) a bit like this:

I remember twenty years ago moving to a job in the public sector but carrying with me a private-sector mindset.  As a result, I floundered around using the wrong language, expecting the wrong things and generally making a fool of myself.  I hadn't taken stock of either the top down or bottom up differences.  Governmental performance metrics are often more concerned with process than with outcomes.  And, many of my employees were there for emotional and altruistic reasons not commercial ones.

This learning was part of what led me to develop the V|E|C|T|O|R Leadership framework - as a problem-solving tool for all of us who work at the pressure point in the diagram above.  V|E|C|T|O|R doesn't assume what's right or wrong, it walks you through a set of choices to arrive at what's going to work in your immediate situation.  And, in that process, you'll take into account both market and business drivers as well as people and cultural ones.  And, it delivers you a one-page Leadership Action Plan.  No self-respecting leader should be seen on the job without such a plan.  It's part of being dressed for success.

Categories for this Potshot:

Career planning, Understanding V|E|C|T|O|R,

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