Identifying Leadership Doorways

Monday 2 July, 2012

by Daniel Holden

As a leader there are opportunities or 'doors' before you which you are invited to walk through. On the other side are new ways of working with your teams and being a great leader. The question is, do you recognise the doors in front of you now?

Old ways of operating as leaders within organisations are crumbling; reacting to problems with yesterday's strategies will not work anymore. In today's complex world we need leaders who commit themselves and their organisations to learning how to hold complexity and competently perform.
Based on the theory of integral leadership developed by Ken Wilber, cofounder of the Integral Institute in the US, there are four areas leaders need to operate in to be successful. If we consider these areas as doorways, the offer insights into how to become a more effective leader and how to better drive overall business performance and success.

The outer system doorway - The value and limitations of key performance indicators

Most successful organisations survive because they execute well on the right side of the integral framework. However, operating mostly in this area can cause potential opportunities and innovation to be neglected as the business is driven mainly by financial performance.
Common problems for businesses operating in this area include:

• A disengaged workforce - deeper passions and desires are seldom uncovered and acted on as they're not considered relevant to business performance
  
• Concerns and fears are only reluctantly brought to the surface
  
• Innovation struggles as leaders are reduced to individual, tactical performers who closely watch and guard their own silos
  
• Organisations are focused exclusively on solving problems and cannot realise a new future.

The outer self doorway - High performance and accountability begin

This arena of leadership is everything we can see, hear, touch and measure regarding surface and external individual performance. Communication from leaders in this area typically involves meetings and performance feedback that is one-way, with an emphasis on presentations, updates, and status reports.
The best leaders, however, learn a discipline that focuses on the language of behavior and use this to break through to their employees and teams. This discipline involves three key components that become the focus of two-way, not one -way conversation. These are:

1. Critical performance incidents - "Here is what I see and hear you doing"
   
2. Performance impact - The personal consequences of someone's behavior, either positive or negative. This kind of information can affect a shift in performance
   
3. Consequences on the team, customers and others - The larger consequences of a person's behaviors, when viewed in light of collective, can ensure feedback isn't too personal but connects the individual's behaviour to business performance.

The inner self doorway - Where sustainable breakthrough begins

This is where each of us secretly lives. We make meaning of our lives and our work here. It's where our motivation and passion for contributing originates and where our vision and hopes and our doubts and fears are born.
Issues of trust, confidentiality, the holding of bitterness against others, resistance to change, the underpinnings of all teamwork, strategic change and organisational excellence, all originate here. Sadly, much of this rich inner landscape goes unexamined. We then try to undergo mergers, drive change and build more innovation into our processes when caution and fear are the prevailing passions. It simply doesn't work.
What is true of elite sports teams is true of any team that wants to pursue extraordinary results: you must have the heart and commitment of people behind you. Heart and commitment lie here, just behind our limiting assumptions.

The inner system doorway - Your culture contains your desired future

This doorway is concerned with vulnerability and the authenticity to say the unspeakable. Every organisation has its scapegoats. When things go wrong these groups become the necessary targets for our frustration and confusion. Senior leaders frequently become targets; the union, front line supervisors, field operations or headquarters, the regulators, our competitors, all take a turn in distracting us from finding real solutions to the challenges we face.
If we don't recognise the real problems our solutions will miss the mark. The real problem always involves us. Until we see our own contribution to the current circumstances we will be unable to see our potential as creators of a new and more viable future.
The trouble in many organisations is we define challenges as problems in ways that are too small to care about and not large enough to inspire.
The most significant differences in leaders are linked to the amount of complexity they have learned to hold, or the number of doorways they've learned to walk through and inhabit. Unprecedented challenges like those we see today require unprecedented responses from leaders and their teams
What doorways do you stand before now? How will you respond? The future happens whether we want it to or not. Why not consciously create it?




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