Increase your leadership power to find and act on opportnities other miss

Organisations have more influence on us than we may like to admit. We are social creatures by nature; therefore an organisation has a profound effect on us. Being in an organisation changes us. It can alter our mood, dull or open up our thinking. It can alter our mannerisms, influence how we behave. It can shape how we relate to each other and, crucially it can also fundamentally influence the outlook we have on our future. Organisations are an altogether more powerful entity than we often realise. The question about the very nature of an organisation is a philosophical question and within philosophy it falls into the domain of metaphysics and ontology. One might argue that organisational management is very practical and should not concern itself with philosophy much. But in fact taking a philosophical perspective is highly relevant. Challenging at first, once mastered it has powerful and direct implication for increasing effectiveness of everyday leadership practice. The nature of people With a philosophical perspective comes an awareness of what can and can’t be influenced, allowing strength to emerge from a having a more grounded stoical perspective. This awareness of what you can and can’t alter helps provide the basis for developing sustainable resilience and focus. As well as allowing insights into where your strengths, leverage and fields of influence are located. How does a leader actually engage with the organisation? If we look into the field of ontology we can find, beyond physical objects, plants, animals and human beings a fourth type of entity which resonates with how organisations, as described above, have the effect of changing our mood, thinking and outlook. These entities are called ‘works’. The critical characteristic of ‘works’ is that they set up a ‘world’. ‘World’ is used here in the same sense as when one talks about the ‘corporate world’, the ‘world of academia’, two people ‘being worlds apart’ or ‘two worlds coming together’. As an approximation we might also refer to world as a culture, a context, a paradigm, a taken for granted common understanding or simply ‘the way things are around here’. When we engage with them we are transported into unique reality. When we are in an organisation we are always in its ‘world’ and consequently this ‘world’ always has a profound effect on us. Why? Humans have evolved to be shaped by as well as shaping the ‘world’ which they inhabit. So by understanding the reality of our ‘world’ we establish a core part of having influence and power within it. That insight brings greater confidence and impact. The challenge of leadership development therefore can only be met within a highly thoughtful, and at the

same time rigorously applied, examination of how we as human beings always think and act based on our implicit (and almost entirely taken for granted) understanding of ‘how things are around here’. This leads to three key logical and fundamental steps, questions, which need to be answered systematically and using the right tools, techniques and approaches, before any approach to leadership and how they ought to operate can be constructed: • What in the first instance, actually is, an organisation? • What is a person? • What is the relationship between people within a given organisation that so profoundly influences each other’s performance? Knowing these things allows the leader to calculate where to focus and prioritise. This provides the ‘vision’. Fuelled by robust insight into the true nature of the challenges being faced and less reliant on ‘old thinking’, gut instinct or much worse, stale ideas not appropriate for new problems. Becoming a visionary leader Only once we systematically and carefully recalibrate this understanding can we adapt ourselves to the organisational reality we may have hitherto overlooked. Then can begin the truly powerful step of opening up and realising new avenues for performance and creativity. So by extending what ‘everyone around here’ takes for granted, leadership more purposefully begins to meet its challenge. Then it deserves the title of ‘Visionary’ – not just mere feel-good talk, but bringing forth something more real and powerful than the circumstances we are immediately confronted with. That’s how we meet the challenges facing us today. Understanding this reality and in doing so mastering it. That is powerful leadership. So what is it, attributes, attitudes……or? Being sincere it’s a bit of a false dichotomy: visionary leaders see their organisations differently to everyone else, but the attributes or attitudes can only be beneficial if they are encased within the appropriate actions. In other words a greater grasp of yourself, people and the organisation itself, is the source for growing the power you possess as a leader.

For more information, please contact: Sue Bosher T: +44 (0)1234 754497 E: susan.bosher@cranfield.ac.uk www.cranfield.ac.uk/som/alp