Are you taking the opportunity to grow as a leader?

Last week, we looked at how vividly you are seeing your potential during the pandemic. This week we will focus on whether you are taking the opportunity to elevate your leadership and grow as a leader during these challenging times.

Whilst the pandemic has had devastating impact on many businesses, it has presented leaders with a tough development experience. Nick Petrie[1] carried out some research into the conditions that enable leaders to develop vertically, in other words to be able to use more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking. The three primary conditions are heat experiences, colliding perspectives and elevated sensemaking — all of which are present at the moment for many leaders.

Heat experiences occur when leaders face complex situations that disrupt and disorient their habitual ways of thinking and require them to search for new and better ways to make sense of the challenges. Colliding perspectives take place when leaders are exposed to people from different backgrounds and opinions which challenge their existing mental models and increase the number of perspectives with which they see the world. Elevated sensemaking happens when leaders use a coach or mentor to support them to integrate and make sense of these new experiences and perspectives and broaden their worldviews as a result.

When all three conditions are present, leaders grow in their vertical leadership. However, if leaders are exposed to heat experiences and colliding perspectives but do not grasp the opportunity for elevated sensemaking, leaders miss out on reflecting upon their learning, integrating it and enlarging their worldview; vertical leadership development is unlikely to take place.

At the present time, it is important for leaders to seek out and use a coach or mentor to capitalise on their learning because, as Nelson Mandela[2] said, “one of the most difficult things is not to change society — but to change yourself”. There is much to explore including:

• What am I learning about myself and others during this heat experience?
• Whose different perspectives have I sought and how has my worldview widened as a result?
• What have I been noticing about leadership — my own and others?
• What have I been doing that I want to accelerate going forward?
• What old ways of thinking and behaviours do I need to leave behind?
• Who am I becoming as a leader?
• How can I best communicate my purpose and unique signature to others?
• What are we aspiring to as a business as we emerge from the pandemic and what outcomes do we envisage?
• How will I manage my time in a different way going forward so that I can focus on our business aspirations and not get side tracked?
• What will enable me to become a more compassionate leader?

As we move from lock-down into the next phase, emergence, there will be many new leadership challenges. It is important to use a coach or mentor to anticipate these challenges together and explore how best to approach them. It will be critical for business leaders to continue to demonstrate that they care, for example by enabling employees who wish to continue to work from home part or full time to create good boundaries for doing so; reconnecting people to their shared organisational values, identity and purpose; and continuing to demonstrate empathy so that people can share their ideas and concerns and feel safe doing so.

[1] Petrie, N (2015), The how-to of vertical leadership Development — Part 2, Center for Creative Leadership.

[2] Mandela, N., Interview with John Battersby of the Christian Science Monitor, 10th February 2000.