Who are the leaders in your organisation? If you are a CEO / MD reading this, you may be looking at your Senior Leadership Team right now. If you are an HR / OD Director, you may be looking at your peers. But what about the people you are not looking at? The people you don’t see weekly at the SLT meeting? What of them? Who’s in your blindspot?
We all make assumptions of who leaders are, how leaders need to be, and what leaders do. What assumptions have you made about leaders?
We believe a leader is someone who chooses to take responsibility for their world.
For themselves, for their relationship with others, for their team, for their organisation, for their community, for their world. And when someone does this, they are showing up as a leader – not as a passive follower, but as an active agent in their own life and in their organisation.
Thus showing up and taking responsibility is what makes a person a leader, which enables everyone to assume to leadership for themselves and their environment.
Everyone is a leader.
Leadership stops being a position assigned by the organisation and becomes a choice every member of the organisation can make.
What else do leaders do?
Leaders grow more leaders by supporting others in the organisation to take responsibility for their world.
And that is a key part of how leadership becomes embedded in the culture of an organisation.
We at Choose Leadership are committed to supporting purpose driven organisations to growing leadership, but not just any kind of leadership. Zenger and Folkman (2002) highlight that leadership is not content specific but rather context specific – it is always contextualised by what it looks like and sounds like and feels like in a particular organisation.
Context is created by the purpose, mission, vision and values of the organisation.
Leadership is not an of the shelf product. It is not a competency framework. It is not a checklist of buzz words that managers are ‘trained in’, but rather a specific way of being and doing in a particular organization. This means that the ‘being’ of leadership requires development of a leader’s inner game as much, or even more so, than the development of their ‘doing’ of leadership and ‘outer game’. And this development is required at every level of the organization to ensure all employees take responsibility for the success of the organization.
Choose Leadership was founded to identify and then deliver on these needs in the context of organisational purpose.
The mission of Choose Leadership is to support purpose driven organisations to:
To empower employees to make day-to-day decisions, based on their impact on the whole organisation;
To embed leadership, initiative, and responsibility throughout the organisation; and,
To unleash people’s creativity and build a company culture of customer-centred innovation.
Visit our website www.chooseleadership.com to find out more about the leadership conversation we have started.
