Leadership 2.0 Starts With the Hard People Work

Brace yourselves team, this is long and it isn’t fun:)

We keep saying it’s not about the leaders and they can’t magically make Psychological Safety for their teams and that is, unfortunately, very true.

The many courses, articles and talks claiming that modelling courageous behaviour is all it takes to help your team open up, are facetious, to say the least, my presumption is that most people preaching “Just be vulnerable and always speak up and they’ll follow” are well aware that’s not the full picture but saying “Firstly you’ll need to do the hard thing - modelling openness all the time and then you’ll have to do all the other hard things that make up the human work - continuously secure organisational permission, overcome mistrust and weariness that the HumanDebt™ created in your own people and ultimately get out of their way and trust them once you’ve empowered them and kitted them with tools” is far less appealing of a message.

Truth is that, in almost complete opposition to what was asked of them before, the successful team leader 2.0 will be a highly EQed inspirational servant there to remove any blockers from the people work be they resources, organisational inertia and HumanDebt or the resistance of their own people to the hard human work. That alone will be the job. Not coding, not organising, not operating, not micromanaging or admin-ing.

I’ve had more than a few leaders from product owners to CTOs and transformation gurus ask where to start of late. With an absolute open heart and gusto to do the work but not enough clarity on how to do it and where to begin.