5 Principles to Guide Today’s Successful Leaders

I was recently working with a Senior Leadership Team of a technology-based company that was challenged by staff members working remotely. Many staff members had been complaining directly to Senior Management about conflicts and frustrations they were having within their teams and between each other outside of their teams about:

• Unclear goals.
• Conflicting objectives. 
• Missed due dates.
• Complaining customers.

I provided training and coaching on 5 Principles of Adaptive Leadership, which rapidly helped these senior leaders and their direct reports to help them and their associates to get back on track. 

Learning Based on Evidence. Each senior leader and their direct reports were instructed to reaffirm that their teams (working remotely) were individually and collectively committed to: 

• Learning, based on the evidence they collected at each process iteration of: 
• Developing. 
• Testing.
• Delivering the software it was responsible for producing and delivering:
• To an internal group. 
• To an external customer.

Testing Assumptions and Beliefs. I led the Senior Management Team, plus their direct reports through a Scenario Planning Session. Together, they created scenarios that accounted for:

• Possible crises that could interrupt their customers’ businesses.
• Cause a resurgence of a public health crisis. 
• A terrorist attack that disabled major US infrastructures. 
• Other future crisis assumptions and hypotheses requiring adaptive responses. 

Streamlining Thoughtful Decision Making. Research has shown that decision-making requires more Senior Leadership time than any other task. 

• I developed a Deliberative Decision-Making Method which we taught to the same group of Senior Leaders and their Direct Reports. 
• Clarify in writing the assumptions and/or hypotheses any decision is based on. 
• Explain the WHY and the WHAT of any decision so people are extremely clear about:
• What any decision is about.
• The process by which their input is being solicited.
• Who is being asked for input.
• Who is empowered to make the final decision.
• If the decision has already been made:
• All the stakeholders need clear explanations on how the decision was made.
• What assumptions and criteria were used to make the decision? 
• Who has been impacted?

Strengthen Transparency, Inclusion, and Accountability. Senior Leaders, like all people who seek help and guidance, first have to admit they have a problem before they can fully accept the support they require to improve. 

• It was important for this enlarged Leadership Team to strengthen their personal and collective commitment to: 
• Accountability. 
• Transparency.
• Inclusion. 
• By taking the steps outlined above:
• These leaders are strengthening their company’s environment of candor and psychological safety. 
• Mutual trust was replacing the conflicts reported between and among individuals and teams. 

Mobilizing Collective Actions. Company-wide collective action was the last phase of my work with this Executive Team and their reports.

• By consistently supporting accountability to learning: 
• Based on evidence.
• With a positive and optimistic mindset.
• Every company associate did, over time, develop: 
• A collective understanding of the company’s current and future needs. 
• A deeper support for the actions they and their colleagues took. 
• To fulfill their customers’ requirements.

I have successfully transferred these ideas and skills to leaders of organizations as small as 5 to many hundreds. 

Tom Drucker MA, ABD is a founding partner of Consultants in Corporate Innovation, transforming leaders and teams plus improving processes in companies big and small. Learn more about him at corporate-innovation.com.