Enough has been said about the year of 2016. It is likely that you have had your ups and downs professionally and personally. By hibernating on our leadership style, we close our eyes and look inside to reflect and deepen the awareness of our impacts enabling us to refine how we lead in our work and homes.

To jump start your leadership hibernation, I offer some questions. On a professional level, what is it in your current way of leading that enabled those ups and downs? What is it in your personal life that enabled those ups and downs at home, and in the office. To explore these questions, try this activity:

• Take out a piece of paper
• Draw a line down the middle
• Title it with your greatest leadership impact of 2016, written in a sentence like “As a result of [insert your action(s) taken], I enabled [insert impact] to happen.”
• Take 3-5 minutes with your eyes closed and relive that experience in your mind
• On the left side of this paper capture the choices, thoughts, and feelings that you recall through that action and impact.
• On the right side of the paper capture the actions, and behaviors you made happen.
• Reflect and hibernate on how you can and will do more of this in 2017

Then, take out another piece of paper

• Perform the same exercise, this time under the title of your greatest leadership mistake of 2016
• Do the exercise, again
• Reflect and hibernate on how you can and will do less of this in 2017

Finally, make a commitment to move both of these experiences into action by any of the following ways:

• Seal the pieces of paper in an envelope to be opened before the end of Q1.
• Write the impacts on a post it and leave it on a visible part of your desk as s daily reminder
• Take a photo of the exercise papers and save them to your phone wall paper or background as a frequent reminder
• Share this exercise with your significant other or team in work and make a joint commitment to support each other in hibernating

Hibernating on your leadership helps to find the breakthrough in your style that can unleash greater impacts in 2017. Go into that quiet space, and contemplate how you plan to advance your leadership impact in 2017.

How will you as an individual, team, or corporation achieve these aspirations, which are most likely bold and daring? The critical path is not rocket science.

1. Select Strategic Aspirations – You / Your team identify what improvements, growth, changes you aspire to achieve. These are aspirations because they represent a “better” state of yourself or your company that you have not yet achieved.
2. Plan & Prioritize Benefits – You / Your team are likely to select strategic aspirations that exhaust your current resources to achieve. Your eyes are likely bigger than your stomach, and they should be. After all, who wants to set boring or “ho-hum” aspirations? In doing so, you need to understand and define the value expected from your aspirations. You also need to appreciate the trade-off decisions you will need to make, and using your value definition, facilitate the trade-off decisions. On a personal level, these trade off decisions are things like going to the gym or watching a movie. On a corporate level, these trade off decisions are things like investing in employee engagement or a new product enhancement. All of your aspirations have value. The best people and companies have a clear articulation of that value and prioritize the importance for themselves.
3. Establish Commitment – This step is all about moving from idea and thought into action. While setting, defining, and prioritizing your aspirations are critical, nothing happens until commitment is made and action is taken. Commitment comes in the form of investment and focus as witnessed by spending time and money to achieve the aspiration. Commitment must be sustained as well. Simply spending time and money does not guarantee commitment. Commitment is best measured by the amount of discretionary effort that is dedicated to your aspirations.
4. Design, Build, Deploy – With the commitment firmly established with ongoing resources dedicated to maintaining the commitment, the future state gets designed, built, and deployed into real-life tangible solutions like going to the gym, eating more healthy, launching a new game-changing product, or deploying a new more efficient process.
5. Realize Benefits – Finally, it is critical to measure the value you have actually delivered. Did you achieve the aspiration you selected in step 1 and defined in step 2? How often do you step on the scale to weigh yourself after healthy eating and exercise? Corporations need to perform this same measurement with a simple audit of the benefits identified in step 2. This feedback loop provides learning opportunities and should be used to restart this 5 step process at the beginning of the next cycle.

Five Steps is all it takes. However, too often individuals and corporations take short cuts by only executing step 1 and 4. This cutting corners can cause unexpected circumstances that undermine your ability to achieve your strategic intentions.

• Skipping step 2 creates an environment where every aspiration is the most important aspiration. Focus gets lost, political agendas take over, and priorities are negotiated on a daily basis by everyone in your company creating chaos and confusion in your company.
• Skipping step 3 leaves your employees unclear on how they relate to and deliver against your aspirations. Time and resources get spent on your aspirations, but no one understands why they are being asked to support these new aspirations. Indifference dominates the troops. Leaders on the hook to deliver on the metrics that relate to the aspirations resort to more “command and control” generating more withdrawal, speculation and distrust. “Duck and cover” becomes the operating culture.
• Skipping step 5 leaves your company with a void of any achievement. Did we achieve our aspirations? If we did, shouldn’t we celebrate? If we didn’t, are we courageous enough to face the facts so we eliminate any mistakes in future years? If you didn’t, and your employees know it, and you don’t face the underperformance as a learning opportunity, you are telling your employees that it is OK to underperform because we’ll just ignore it.

In the end, these 5 steps are strategic implementation hygiene. They are not hard to implement, and cutting any of the steps out seriously jeopardizes your ability to be successful. Most companies have several of these steps implemented. The improvement opportunity is in building out capability around the missing steps to put yourself in a better position to achieve your aspirations.

If this topic has peaked your interest, come check out out Webinar at the end of January 2017. See below for more details!

Overall details

[Webcast Title] Do you have the Organizational Muscle Required for Strategic Success?

Wednesday, Jan 25th / 9am PT/12pm ET

In advance of great achievement, organizations put together clear aspirations and visions. But they often try to achieve that vision without the internal muscle required to actually execute on the plan. In this webinar, I will clearly explain what is needed (and often missing) for true, transformational success.

Join this webcast if you want to:

• Develop an actionable business plan to improve your organization’s vision
• Identify the strength of your team for strategic success
• Leverage Change Management for business value 

http://foresight.decisionlens.com/webcast-organizational-strategic-success?src=JR

Are these conditions (ways of thinking, behaving and valuing) enabling or inhibiting the achievement of your goals? What if you could influence them so they were enthusiastically enabling you and your team? What would be possible if that happened?

The hard truth is that your situation is most likely sub-optimized, meaning, these ways of thinking, acting, and valuing are not aligned. They are commingling in an intoxicating and invisible way to make it harder for you to be successful. This sub-optimization is not necessarily intentional. It is unconsciously created because no one in your environment is looking at these conditions at the individual or system level and doing something to remediate them. Further, people are most frequently conditioned to optimize for their own individual gain which automatically sub-optimizes the system.

So, you are stuck dealing with these individual and system conditions. They will continue to impact you until they don’t impact you by one of three options:

1. You remove yourself
2. Someone else removes you
3. The environment changes the conditioning

Options 1 & 2 are self-explanatory. Let’s talk about option 3 and your choices therein.

You are a part of the environment and you likely underestimate your impact on it. You have personal choices you can make to influence the environment and affect the individuals and the system conditioning. The best leaders understand this personal choice and how they affect their environment. Do you accept your current environment or do you want, dare I suggest need, to be a better leader in your environment? If you want, or dare to impact your environment, just make the choice. The minute you make your choice, you influence the system of conditions at play, and you either improve the system to operate more effectively or you degrade the system. This happens with EVERY CHOICE you make. Your growth as a leader starts within you, and is demonstrated by your making new decisions.

Now, these new decisions are likely not a part of your current individual conditioning. If they were they wouldn’t be new! These new decisions exist outside your current comfort zone. Your comfort zone is a metaphor for your current conditioning. To modify your current conditioning you must get outside your comfort zone.

Therefore, to impact the system level conditioning, you start with your own conditioning. What have you been conditioned to value, do and think is important? How could you modify what you value, what you do, and how you think such that you generate a new system condition that generates success for you and for others?

Take the time to choose wisely, outside your comfort zone.

“In the future, the real core competence of companies will be the ability to continuously and creatively destroy and remake themselves to meet customer demands.”

–Noel Tichy, Author of The Leadership Engine

The concept of re-inventing ourselves is not new. There are countless examples of this mantra in history, think about the U.S.S.R, Germany, or China, and our contemporary culture, think of the TV show The Biggest Loser or the movie The Pursuit of Happyness. The real challenge surrounds your willingness and ability to reinvent yourself. How do you reinvent yourself? Your team? Your company? Your community?

From a transformation perspective, I see the challenge as one of creating an engine of change that will drive your strategic agenda to produce your desired results. To make this happen, a couple of key questions should be answered to set you off in the right direction, including but not limited to:

• Do you know where you are going? What are your desired financial results? What are your desired non-financial results? How do these two sets of results relate to each other?
• How will you drive the transformation? Who serves as the gas pedal? Who serves as the brakes? How do you minimize stepping on the gas and the brake simultaneously?
• Where are the brains of your transformation? Do you have enough? Do you have the right ones? Are they performing to your needs?
• Who serves as the soul of your strategic transformation? Is your team engaged? Have you won the hearts and minds of the team?
• Would you describe the leadership style of your transformation engine as visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, or commanding?¹ How versatile are your leaders and employees in flexing their style across all of these types? Which of these is optimal for your transformation?
• Would you describe the culture of your transformation engine as “interdependent collaborative”, “independent achiever”, or “dependent confirmer”?² Which of these is optimal for  your transformation?
• Are you unleashing the professional, personal, and emotional capacity of the team to maximize your opportunity for success? If not, why not? What can you do differently to make this happen?
• As with any engine, what is your fuel? Are you maintaining your engine? Is it working in concert with the other moving parts or are they out of sync components?

Behind every result, good or bad, there are a series of events. And behind those events are people making decisions, or not, that impact the future. If you have well documented and understood desired results, you are one step ahead of most. With the benefit of understanding the desired results, your challenge is to identify the transformation engine, associated capabilities, people, and working styles that will propel you to deliver your desired financial and non-financial results.

Notes

• ¹From Primal Leadership, Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
• ²From Transforming Your Leadership Culture, by John B. McGuire and Gary B. Rhodes

Related articles

• The Pursuit of Happyness (crossfitovercome.com)
• Organizational Capability for Transformation (businesstransformation.wordpress.com)