Previously I’ve been a bit reluctant to add to the myriad of books, blogs, podcasts and research reports in the world. But I think there’s a gap in the conversation about the deceptively hard world of being a leader at a human level.

In my opinion, there’s too much philosophising and theorising about leadership making it hard for people to navigate the practicalities. You know, what it actually takes to navigate the inner workings and outer mechanics of leading yourself and other people.

So, having decided to create more candid conversations about leadership for humans I found myself finger on the keyboard embracing a bad case of imposter’s syndrome and a challenging case of writer’s block.

It’s been a painful few months.

Conventional wisdom says to sort out your frailties then you’ll be good to go. But I say don’t. Don’t sort out your frailties first that is. 

It’s the act of making stuff happen that really puts those frailties to rest. Actually doing stuff is the perfect distraction to our overly imaginative mind.

The human mind is designed to protect us at all costs. To de-risk what we do. Our imagination is a finely tuned fear making machine that talks us out of doing anything we might have a grain of doubt about. It soothes our worry brilliantly giving us permission to give up. To not bother. 

And as a bonus, the voice in our head gives us excuse after excuse to use on ourselves. 

How often has your highly creative mind talked you out of a perfectly good idea or intention? That sneaky voice in your head that tells you to hang on, to hang back, to play it safe?

When we listen to ourselves too hard or too often we stop doing anything at all. We delay and procrastinate until the opportunity is gone. How convenient? How frustrating? How self-stress inducing?

How confidence-sapping is all that emotional baggage we carry around?

But when we let ourselves off the hook we’re left luxuriating in our comfort zone. That cosy place where we can lock out our worries for another day. 

Until of course reality kicks in and we realise we are back where we started. No progress made and our human frailties intact. Perfect conditions to mentally brutalise ourselves all over again. 

The mind is a powerful thing that’s not as useful as we’d like it to be. But when you lead your mind instead of following your natural instincts, almost anything is possible.

When our imagination stokes fear and loathing, we can reset our frame of mind to generate positive optimism and switch anxiety to confidence. When we’re feeling weak and vulnerable, we muster our courage and get on with the work anyway.

How clever we are if we choose to lead. 

I know as I waited until everything is clear in my head before I start writing, nothing got written. My ideas and opinion were self-silenced. 

Similarly, when I listened to my inner world view that there’s already enough written in the world by leadership coaches, it did help me and frustrated my ambition to help people who struggle to do something hard that they don’t feel well equipped to do. 

As much as people turn to me as an expert in leadership, I’m as human as anyone with my own mind playing games with me.  Believe me, the sense of irony is not lost on me.

If leadership is anything it’s about embracing who you are as a human being and making choices. Leadership is the difference between staying cosy in your comfort zone or hauling yourself off the metaphorical sofa and into action. 

I’m not saying any of this is easy but the better we know ourselves and lead ourselves the better it is for everyone.

And, certainly is for your psyche.

There’s so much more to explore about how mindset, and other human characteristics, affects how we create for others. 

It’s why I’m backing festivals like MOD, Mindset of Design. This is a weeklong festival of events, workshops and networking exploring the what it truly takes to be human-centric when you’re designing for others.

Whether you’re leading other people, designing products and services or starting new ventures that help people, it all starts with what’s going on in the mind. Your mind, and the minds of the people you aim to serve.

So if you’re in in the business of making change happen, starting from scratch or wrangling technology to work better for people MOD is the place to bring a human-centric view to your work. 

My colleague Sarb Johal and I going to be there co-creating conversations about embracing leadership for humans. 

There are also other fascinating sessions for you to think more deeply about being human, such as:

• Listening – the missing half of the conversation
• Play with purpose
• Gaining self-mastery
• Creative Resilience
• Storytelling with purpose.

Come to Wellington and join the conversation. Find like-minds and people who think very differently to you.

And, if you can’t make it to Wellington in November, I’ll be back sharing what I learned so we can all work better by embracing our human-side.

Yet, it’s one of the biggest struggles of mangers and leaders to build a truly high performing team.

So often we turn to sports to find the secret elixir of team building. We analyse the dynamics and mechanics of how top teams perform consistently. But it’s not often we appreciate that behind every high performing team, there’s a team that’s sole purpose is to build the team and its performance.

Elite teams have coaches, mentors, psychologists, scientists, technicians and an array of other experts, all employed to create the conditions, strategies and activities that bring individuals and the team as a whole to peak performance when it matters. But, how often do teams at work have that kind of support?

To be fair, there are many teams who have coaches or other work experts to help but mostly that responsibility falls to the leader on a day-to-day basis. And, there’s the challenge.

For most people leading teams it’s not their first order of work. We like to think we prioritise building and supporting our team as our top priority but mostly this isn’t the case.

It doesn’t make them bad people, or leaders, it’s just the reality of business life.

I’m the first person to place responsibility for team building squarely with the team leader. But, I also know that the best performing teams share the responsibility and accountability for how their team works.

When all members of a team play their part and do their bit to build their team every day, the team as a whole goes further faster and enjoys their work more in the process.

High performing teams don’t diminish the role of team leader. They expand its importance by everyone showing leadership creating the space for the leader of the team to play a bigger role and make a bigger impact.

When teams lead collectively, they become tighter as a group of people. The bonding is stronger and the impact more progressive.

It’s not so much about how you can build your team, but how can you make your team tighter so the collective contribution makes high-performance inevitable.

Because building teams is such a challenge for so many people, I’ve teamed up with Out of Office to talk team leadership. We’ll be taking time away from the office to think about how our teams work and what we can do to make it easier, simpler and more fun to build our teams.

Would love to know what’s your secret to building your team. Leave a comment, and share your team’s performance elixir!

Chauvinism aside, Harry has good insight into human nature.

• How much more do we prefer an idealised version of ourselves? 
• What do we know about ourselves that we turn a blind eye to?
• What is the good in us that we’re uncomfortable accepting?

In the leadership stakes, self-awareness is considered to be a pre-requisite. Although studies have shown that this is a rarer quality than you might think because self-knowledge is a combination of internal self-awareness (how we see and experience ourselves) and external self-awareness (how other people see and experience us).

But in my experience, knowing yourself isn’t enough. It’s accepting who you are that is truly liberating. 

This means embracing your talents, your foibles, your idiosyncrasies and limitations for what they are. We all have them. It’s what makes us human. And, in my opinion much more interesting to know.

But, in my experience, most people eschew such radical self-inquiry. Often this is because we think being emotionally intelligent is all fluff and woo-woo or we’re too emotionally squeamishness and can’t face what they might find out about ourselves.

Get to grips with this internal and external perspective of yourself and you’ll be happier, more creative and more satisfied in life and work. And, able to just lead better because you’re less likely to play the mind games that hold us back and reduce the friction in our relationships that can bring us down.

The added bonus of mental and emotional flossing is that it doesn’t just help us to operate better ourselves but helps us to better understand other people too. Self-empathy is the root of being more empathetic with others.

There’s a bit of Harry Burns in all of us. We judge other people with clarity but harbour vagueness about ourselves. Even the most self-knowing people are apt to dismiss the best and worst bits about themselves, leaving a muddled tangle in the mind to contend with.

In the past, people were interpreted on the basis of their personality types but thankfully people sciences, such as neuroscience and behavioural economics, are helping us know ourselves and others better based on the biological cues we get from our brain and the psychological clues we can read in other people’s behaviour.

Humans are complicated but thankfully there is a myriad of tools to help us bring an outside perspective to ourselves. 

There’s nothing like a good self-assessment quiz, profile, reflection or feedback activity to prompt awareness and deepen your self-knowledge. These tools help you bring more perspective to yourself and other people.

My latest favourite is one that helps people explore their creative ‘personality’. Designed by the fine folks at Adobe it’s biased towards ‘creative types’ but truthfully applies to everyone, whether we consider ourselves creative or not.

According to the test, my creative type is “An Adventurer”. Reading through the profile results I started to get all sorts of internal resistance. Firstly resistance to being typecast at all, then resistance to the nuances of the profile itself. After browsing the full range of types I saw more of “The Producer” in me. 

This response made me question, and not for the first time, whether I’m answering the questions to reinforce an idealised version of myself rather than my real self. And, whether subconsciously I’m frightened to appreciate myself.

Whilst it’s good to know what ‘type’ of person you are, it’s knowing what you think and feel about the profile results that give you self-knowledge

Go try the mycreativetype assessment and see how this makes you think about yourself and others.This article is based on my musings and research for a booklet I’m writing about self-leadership, self-awareness and self-acceptance and its role in liberating leadership.

So, I’m curious to know what you think is the hardest thing about getting to know yourself or others better?

Please leave a comment and let me know.

That something can be a belief, a goal, a standard of work, a promise to do something, a cause. Do you get my drift?

Whatever you’re standing for, it’s the act of commitment and action that makes for leadership. Thinking it isn’t enough, you have to make something happen for leadership to be experienced.

If I’ve had any ambition in my career it’s to democratise leadership. To make it less about something that leaders and managers do and everything about the personal power that every individual can exercise given the right conditions.

Which brings me to one of my pet hates, the whole, let’s empower our people peeve. Even hearing the word puts my hackles up.

Probably best I explain.

As a leadership developer, I hear people talk about empowerment all the time. This is a typical seesaw of empowerment comes up in conversation.

• “I really want to empower my team.”
• I’m empowering my team by delegating my work to them.”
• “My team are empowered to make their own decisions but they still ask me what they should do.”
• “I told Team Member ‘X’ they should feel empowered but they don’t seem to be changing their ways at all.”
• “I wish I was allowed to do more.” (i.e, I don’t feel empowered)
• “I just don’t feel empowered do my job my way.”
• “They (the leadership) want us to be “empowered” (using two finger air quotes) but they can’t stop micromanaging everything we do.
• I feel bullied and harassed by my manager, s/he keeps on micromanaging me” (i.e I’m too frightened to be empowered).

Seeing empowerment in action is a glorious thing. And when it does, few people are talking about “being empowered”.

Instead, they talk about how much they enjoy their job, what they’ve achieved and some a story that tells me about how something went really well, how proud they are of their team and talk about their colleagues in a collegial way.

Empowering people is lauded as one of the most important leadership skills. After all, empowered employees make for a more engaged and productive workforce. The flip side of empowerment is responsibility and accountability.

In my opinion, empowerment has become one of those weasel words in the lexicon of management and leadership. It’s a linguistic sticking plaster for the impasse between a manager and their team. Trying to empower people is plain wrong, and here’s why.

Take a typical scenario.

The team leader wants their team to step up their performance and do their best work, to take more initiative and accountability for their results. By happy coincidence, the team wants the same. The manager works with the team to set their own goals and make their own decisions about how they’re going to do the work and then leaves them to their self-reliant ways to do a great job.

But not much changes. Initially, individual or team feel excited at the outset and does a great job making plans. But quickly people struggle to make progress, to organise, to live up to the self-defined standards. The team manager gets frustrated with the lack of progress. They watch a little closer, noticing that people aren’t taking up the new mode of “being empowered”. It isn’t long before watching becomes supervising before the manager intervenes and takes control again.

So what goes wrong?

In these situations, people think that there has been a transfer of power but what actually opens up is a leadership gap. Teams that are used to leaving the leading to the leader overlook that empowerment means self-motivation, self-reliance and self-coaching. All that’s down to the individual human.

Being fully empowered means taking up the leadership slack. For many people, it’s an inconvenient truth. They can’t be empowered, they can only empower themselves.

So, like the proverbial chicken and egg, which comes first leadership or empowerment?

When we put so much emphasis on people in leadership positions empowering their teams, we overlook activating the leadership necessary for full responsibility, resourcefulness and accountability to happen.

It’s implicit that with empowerment there’s a necessity to lead yourself. But in my experience, people think empowerment means gaining power from someone else, in other words, it means choice. The choice to do things their way. To choose whether to do at all. A sense of freedom and power to focus on your own terms.

The most empowered people aren’t worrying about whether they have the power because they work in an environment where they have all they need to lead themselves well. They take their leadership responsibility seriously and use it contribute to the best of their ability.

They don’t waste time wondering their purpose, their values, the rules of engagement because that’s all pre-determined with a clear agenda. Their work is to follow that lead.

Great leadership has a tendency to generate more leadership.

So, if you’re looking for a simple recipe empower your team, just stop. You’ll never be truly successful. Instead, focus on these four conditions that enable leadership to happen:

1. Direction — curate your agenda with the clarity of purpose, values, goals and ambition that sets the direction, the expectation and the motive for what needs to be done, and why.
2. Trust — believe that people can, and will, do the right thing to the best of their ability. This isn’t a leap of faith but the foundation for everything to sit. And, remember when it comes to people, trust is a two-way street.
3. Backing — give people the right tools, enough time, resources and coaching systems that invoke clear communication and execution.
4. Challenge — give people the challenge to be bolder and more creative in their work. It’s natural for people to fail sometimes. Make learning central to people’s work and make it safe for trial and error to be part of figuring things out.

When you share the leadership load with people, it’s natural for them to empower themselves. Go try changing the conversation and create the right conditions for everyone to lead for themselves, and see how enabling, not empowering, is the way to go.

“…this is the era of activist businesses that make it their company’s mission to create social change…”

It got me thinking more deeply about how the most successful businesses seem to have a clear agenda they become known for. They don’t just think it, nor say it, they act on it.

In the past, social impact was a nice spin on corporate social responsibility. The softer edge to hard-nosed business. Today, the most progressive companies are agents of change with leaders that promote a clear agenda to do good

The best kind of agendas are those that make the company, and us, look good and feel good in the process. The kind of leadership for humans that helps everyone rally together and stay in synch with something bigger than any one person.

Today’s leaders are making humble pie not having pie in the sky ideals that are hard to uphold.

All leadership starts with an ambition; an idea and a mission. But, in the rough and tumble of business when people are pulled in so many directions, pressures build up. It’s natural for leaders to get distracted, overwhelmed and disoriented. Under these circumstances, it’s easy to forget what you’re all about, even if you have a snappy strap-line to remind you.

The true test of leadership is to set ideals and live up to them publicly.

I confess I’ve spent hundreds of hours working with leaders in organisations of all types and sizes thoughtfully turn their intentions into beautifully crafted leadership statements. Yet, I’ve spent as much time supporting people bemused, belittled and befuddled by those prescribed standards.

How hard can it be, I’ve wondered, for people to set and stick to their ideals?

It’s a hard truth to suggest but too often leaders intellectualise their motives and theorise about their impacts. It’s a case of it’s easier to say it, than do it.

So, I’ve been pondering how about we infiltrate more activism and less idealism into leadership. Wondering if we infused our businesses with a clearer agenda, would we be more or less likely to be the leader our customers, colleagues and collaborators would respect?

One of the most inspiring companies I know, is CoGo, known formerly as Conscious Consumers. They’re all about helping people live up to their ethical and social conscience, one shopping transaction at a time. 

CoGo has evolved from a small voluntary organisation to one of New Zealand’s most successful social enterprises, that’s now in the UK. What’s stayed constant under the leadership of Co-Founder, Ben Gleisner, is their relentless pursuit to put power into the hand of consumers so businesses can take action on the things that matter most to their customers, such as reducing waste, paying people a living wage and switching to local, ethical, sustainable and cruelty free goods.

But, business activism doesn’t have to be on a global scale. Some businesses make their difference at local community level.

Thankyou Payrollputs purpose and profit side-by-side with their community. They make payroll services accessible to small businesses and charities and distribute part of their profits to good causes and community groups via their Charitable Trust.

Talk to Thankyou Payroll CEO, Christina Bellis, and she champions much more than the services or their philanthropy. She sees a big opportunity for supporting their customers to follow their lead to be more socially and environmentally conscious, such as reducing their carbon footprint or adopting flexible and equitable working practices.

Being a social enterprise isn’t a pre-requisite for having an agenda. All companies can be enlivened by doing something that’s more meaningful than just making a profit.

In my recent work with tech startups at Creative HQ in Wellington, I’ve seen passion develop into exciting businesses and big ideas fall flat through lack of a clear leadership perspective. The ones that stand are those who not just to serve customers, but are leading a bigger movement through their products and services.

Take Hnry, which takes away the hassle of financial admin for self-employed people by bringing it all into one simple, affordable and accessible service. They want contractors and freelancers to be free from the headaches of handling their tax and accounting. Hnry champions people to take the leap into self-employment and focus on what independent workers love most, the work. In doing so, Hnry has broken new ground to become a trusted financial sidekick for sole traders and one of New Zealand’s fastest-growing tax agencies. 

Or, Sharesies, which makes investing easy. The co-founders wanted someone with $50 to have the same investment opportunities as someone with $50,000. They’ve gone on to transform the investing landscape in New Zealand helping many thousands of kiwis grow their personal wealth. Their leadership as a company helps people make affordable investing a long-term habit.

If you want to create a leadership philosophy that makes business a force for good, you could become a Certified B Corporation. B Corp’s define their success by the positive impact they create for employees, communities and the environment. Or, you can just lead with greater activism with a clear agenda you’re determined to uphold.

And there’s the rub. Having an ‘agenda’ has a bad rap. It’s most often considered to be manipulative and secretive. More prosaically, it’s become the bi-word for bureaucratised conversations. 

But according to Fowler’s, Modern English Usage, agenda actually means “things to be done”.

To me, having an agenda is a powerful declaration. It beats passive statements of leadership intent so full of weasel words and vacuous statements.

With a clear and simple agenda, you have a rallying cry. The prod in the direction you want others to subscribe so together you can be part of something bigger together.

Declaring an agenda cuts through the clutter and chatter that can dilute leadership intentions, and make leaders appear passive.

For the record, let’s assume that your agenda isn’t destructive, illegal nor unethical. The agenda you are setting is about activating your business for good, not evil.

Having a simple and clear agenda helps you stay on track. It’s a way to bring a sharper, more human perspective on your values, purpose and vision. It can be the vehicle to make your leadership ambitions a reality.

Whether you are the one setting, shaping or following an agenda, it all takes leadership. The willingness to have a point of view and wantingness to take action with feeling and meaning.

We all have an agenda. Right?

And mine?

Taking a no-nonsense approach to leadership development for entrepreneurial and creative people.

I believe leadership has become overhyped and overplayed in meaningless ways. It’s left people confused about what leadership is, and isn’t. And, whether they are leadership material. 

In my experience there is leadership. There are leaders. And there are people who just lead. These are the activists who are making the biggest difference because they lead with a clear agenda.

People can be more productive, creative and entrepreneurial in their work when the agenda is clear. It not just common sense but makes for better leadership.

What do you think?

I’m curious – what’s your agenda? 

What makes you an activist in your work?

Let’s discuss.