OUTsight/ Choosing Your Context

Photo by Vino Li on Unsplash

Manila, 6 January 2021 — What will your bigger game look like?

Story

The new year was 2007, just before the financial crisis hit the world, when Tony Mayo, a leadership researcher, warned in the Harvard Business Review against focusing too much on the individual characteristics of leaders and not enough on their situational context. 

What matters most, he wrote prophetically, is how the opportunity for leadership emerges “when environmental factors and individual action come together.” 

The neglect he pointed out, and the crisis that followed, provided a context for many stories about pervasive failures of leadership. The crisis also gave birth to new stories of positive changes achieved through disruption, insight, and innovation. 

Challenge

Fast forward to your start of 2021. A time of darkness as the world battles the global Covid-19 pandemic. And a time of promise and gathering momentum in the Decisive Decade to create a better world with the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Leadership always happens in a context. We know that now. But there is more. Not only does context help you discover and shape your leadership style and action but, just like the energies of Yin and Yang alternate, it also works the other way around. 

You can choose and shape the context of your leadership. Have you thought of that? There is no better time than now to do it, as you start this second year in the Decisive Decade.

Question

What most people will do at this time is to satisfy themselves with new year’s resolutions, unwilling to acknowledge that the context of their busy life will swallow them up less than a month later. If you’re in that camp, you will squander a valuable opportunity to lead much-needed change in the world.

The better scenario is for your leadership to emerge with your chosen context and your action coming together, as Tony Mayo hinted back in 2007.

The question to ask yourself is what context you will choose for making a difference with your leadership in 2021. Will you, as the saying goes, decide to play a bigger game—and what will that look and feel like for your business, for your team, and for you personally?