INsight/ At All Levels

Photo by Getty on Unsplash.

Ubud, 22 August 2024 — Developing leaders at all levels will boost performance and well-being in the organization.

Story

It happened this week. The guest editorial my colleague Brian McIntosh and I co-authored for the World Water Policy journal tells the story of organizations and projects with plenty of experts and executives, and not enough leaders. Without developing leaders, how will our businesses and governments create a more sustainable, peaceful, and prosperous world? Our look at the water sector shows how investing in leaders and leadership has been overlooked in the past decade. No wonder the world is significantly off-track in SDG#6 for water management.

How does such oversight happen? Everyone is ‘busy’ with their projects. We see no shortage of new projects with grand visions and large capital outlays for infrastructure using the latest technologies and mentioning that collaboration is needed. Yet, while it is by now common knowledge that most water problems are people problems (the same goes for other sectors), we hardly see any investments to develop the human capital—including the leadership abilities—needed to design and deliver these projects with their anticipated collaboration. Why is that still the case?

Many professionals have shared with me, including this week, that they see leadership as a set of soft skills that are important. Yet this comes mostly as an afterthought. Does that mean that our workplaces still lack a clear framework showing how solving problems (by experts) is different from optimizing resources (by managers) and influencing positive change (by leaders)? All three are needed, and in our guest editorial, we argue for developing leaders at all levels of organizations. That is a different approach from what we see happening today.

Challenge

While we know from the research that leadership and management are not the same thing, we see that most businesses and governments are still focused on selecting and preparing staff to become managers and then executives. Nothing wrong with this, except if it is the only growth strategy and career path available. It confirms the old-fashioned and limiting mindset that leaders are the people in positions of authority. This mindset keeps organizations stuck in sub-par performance and struggling to innovate.

In the guest editorial, Brian and I make the case for moving beyond this outdated mindset, to the paradigm that organizations will thrive in performance and well-being when they embrace and invest in developing leaders at all levels. This is particularly important considering the many ‘wicked’ sustainability problems to be addressed in our workplaces and projects today. These cannot be solved without investing in people’s abilities to lead change and collaboration across silos.

To embrace leadership at all levels means to start seeing leadership skills as the hard core of human-centered development instead of as optional soft skills. When preparing projects with grand visions and large budgets for infrastructure, leadership abilities will help create a human-centered design approach where we carefully consider the changes that the project needs to bring about, and then determine what investment in leadership abilities is needed to drive those changes.

Question  

This week in the Grow3Leaders community of practice we were thrilled to start working with leaders in a water technology company who are taking the human-centered approach to heart, including collaborative leadership development among staff across levels and locations, supported by an in-house professional with coaching credentials. Their latest Collab to join The Workplace Challenge has set themselves the task of breaking silos in the business. That is music to our ears.

Developing leaders at all levels in the organization is a powerful vision and a new paradigm. To help you and your colleagues move to that vision, we coach teams of emerging and mid-career leaders, as well as executives with an ambition to grow their leadership abilities to the next level. They learn how to lead across boundaries, including disciplines and locations. Breaking silos also includes cross-generational (crossgen) leadership that brings us together to collaborate effectively in a human-centered way.

What transition do you see coming up for yourself and your team in your development as leaders? What silos or limits do you want to break? In our leadership coaching, we challenge you to drive change and bring on new leadership behaviors for better performance and well-being in your organization. Your leadership growth happens when you take on a challenge, individually and together. Set up a Free Strategy Call to let me know the leadership transition that lies ahead of you.