Challenging Yourself Through Adaptive Leadership

Have you wondered why some companies seem able to handle whatever comes their way including the difficult economic conditions over the last year? While other companies go bankrupt, the successful companies deliver results over and over again. If you could look inside these companies there’s a good chance you will find adaptive leaders who remain invigorated and ready to accept any challenges coming their way while becoming change agents.
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Operational Responsibilities Of Leaders

The depth and scope of operational responsibilities within an organisation can greatly vary, yet there is one constant. Leaders are needed to integrate the vision or mission of the organisation with the day-to-day activities. It is fine to have a well-defined mission, but the only way true value can be reached is if the organisation has developed leadership roles, which take the business from end-to-end without losing sight of the defined goals.
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Being a Project Sponsor Means Championing a Cause

When talking about the positions on a project team, the ones that come to mind first are project leader, project manager and team members. Time is spent designing the project, selecting the right members, establishing the critical path leading to end goals, and establishing a reporting and measurement system. Unfortunately, what many firms discover is that the project still seems to get off course even with all the elements so carefully aligned.
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Leadership and Counselling DO Mix!

Despite what you may believe or have been taught in the past, leadership and counselling do mix. This is not to say a leader must be a psychologist with medical diplomas hanging on the wall to be an effective leader. But the combination of leadership and counselling functions is a natural mix because people will often need assistance on the job in order to fulfil their potential and maximise the application of their abilities.

In other words, a leader as counsellor is a change agent who is responsible for helping employees and team members turn abilities into successful actions that benefit staff and company alike. These actions should be company mission focused while promoting employee personal success. This is a key role of a leader and one that is often minimised in the daily rush to get products or services into the marketplace.

Adapting to Change Through Counselling

But studies have shown that companies which train leaders to build company success by developing employee success are more competitive and more adaptive to changing marketplace environments. In difficult economic times, companies that are unable to change as needed to respond to financial pressures or rapidly changing consumer requirements will quickly fade away.

People need help to realize their potential though, and that is where leadership and counselling functions merge. Through administrative training, leaders learn how to counsel employees on a number of levels.

• Develop employee skills to meet needs of the job
• Assist with resolution of personal issues within the work environment that impact ability to perform job functions
• Learn to recognise organisational leadership potential that can be developed
• Provide on-the-job training to employees that promotes success of the business
• Match employee skills to the right job or team position
• Assist employees with development of interpersonal skills
• Learn to manage difficult employees not performing as expected
• Identify morale problems impacting project success
• Learn communication skills so able to teach, train, and monitor employees as needed

As a change agent, leaders must be able to work with a variety of people while assisting them with skills development. In fact, good leaders as counsellors, focus on training employees to become leaders themselves within their abilities. Leadership training covers a range of activities from making good decisions while performing a task to managing a large number of people.

Adapt, Compete and Succeed

Being a counsellor as part of the leadership function, along with the other responsibilities of trainer, corrector and mentor, requires the leader to develop particular skills needed to build a team and keep the team on track. The team may be a project team, a department or even the entire organisation. Every organisation has multiple teams operating at once.

The job of counselling requires being able to consistently and successfully assist others to reach their full potential within their assigned position in a pro-active manner. As a counsellor, the leader will be able to effectively train employees, identify potential leaders, present information, match personal traits to expected organisational roles, and provide useful positive and negative feedback in a way that promotes employee improvement.

Professional leadership training can play a critical role in the ability of the company to develop its human resources to full capability. Since most companies invest heavily in their people, it only makes sense to insure employees are being utilised in the most efficient and effective manner possible. A motivated workforce that has internalised the mission of the organisation is one of the major indications a company is ready to adapt, compete, and succeed.

The Power of Visualising Success

It may seem odd at first to consider the power of visualising success along with creative tension, but they go hand-in-hand in an effective organisation. Creative tension is inspired thinking that goes beyond the current comfort level and often leads to new ideas, goals, and expectations. Success is the actual achievement of those goals.

When you combine the creative tension with the visualisation of success what is created is an environment which is exceptionally motivating and energizing. It is out of these kinds of environments you see leaders emerge. The location is not important. The environment is the most important. If location alone was all that determined success, Apple computers would not exist because the garage location where the idea was born would have limited the vision of success.

Seeing Clearly

When you hand a new employee a policy and procedures manual, it is a roadmap for succeeding in the organization. It defines the mission and conveys a sense of culture. But these types of documents are not visionary. They are documentary and only serve to inform about rules and processes. You can use a policy and procedures manual to establish the rules of play, but they are not effective at creating a vision of the future.

So what is vision? Vision refers to seeing something other than with ordinary sight. Reading a policy and procedures manual does not require vision…only intelligence. A vision is something a person sees in their mind’s eye and embraces on a very personal level. There is the noun “vision” which is the mental image of an outcome. There is also the verb “visualising” which refers to the act of having vision.

It is not difficult to understand how the focus of visionary thinking can be extremely motivating. When you visualise anything, it can often become true because of its motivating power which drives you to seek success. Whole books have been written on the power of visualising including the well known book, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. In this book the theory of autosuggestion is discussed. The premise is that if you think about something long enough and hard enough, it becomes a part of your subconscious and drives your actions to make the vision become a reality. This book was devoted to developing personal wealth, but the power of visualisation is made clear for all situations. You can think it and make it come true.

Envision and Succeed

In an organisation, the power of visualising success is the source of leadership on a management and personal level. Organisational members who can “see” success as a specific outcome have more direction and more motivation to pursue creative solutions and new concepts. When someone understands what their actions are intended to accomplish, a goal exists. When someone can visualise success, they incorporate much more than just meeting a specific goal. Instead, the organisational member has a more expansive view that includes how their personal contributions and abilities can contribute to the success of the organisation.

It is easy to see the power of visualising success when you understand the many benefits that ensue.

• Personal nature of visionary thinking promotes individual development to the good of the company

• Visionary thinking increases creative thinking and problem solving

• Visionary thinking removes common barriers which impede organisational progress because success becomes “hard-wired” into the subconscious

• Visualising success is motivating

• Visualising success promotes organisational unity when allowed to become a shared vision

It is easy to be esoteric and assume the power of visualising success is only available to the chosen few within an organisation. But success within a business begins with its staff and employees who incorporate company goals and the company mission into their lives. When people are able to visualise success, they allow creative tension to inspire and challenge in a way that can lead to innovation or new ways of doing things.