Do you know your Company’s Leadership DNA?
I found myself googling ‘How to be a better leader’ toward the end of a challenging week. A few missed deadlines, uncomfortable conversations with stakeholders, and a lengthy team assessment left me in some doubt about my ability to be a ‘good leader’.
Results from my google search via HBR:
“Occupying a leadership position is not the same thing as leading. To lead, you must be able to connect, motivate, and inspire a sense of ownership of shared objectives. Heightening your capacity to lead others requires being able to see how you think and act, and how your behaviour affects others. Leading well requires a continuous journey of personal development. Yet people in leadership roles often eschew the long and challenging work of deepening self-insight in favour of chasing after management “tools”— preferably the “quick ’n’ easy” kind, such as personality type assessments that reduce employees to a few simplistic behavioural tendencies. Tools can be handy aids to good leadership. But none of them can take the place of fearless introspection, feedback seeking, and committed efforts to behavioural change for greater effectiveness and increased positive impact on others.”
Based on this definition, effective leadership cannot be achieved without a healthy dose of fearless introspection, which I am no stranger to. After all, to know me is to know that I keep personal work diaries to avoid making old mistakes and chart my leadership growth.
But this practice didn’t stop me from repeating a mistake I’d made before: not assessing an organisation's ‘Leadership DNA’. At the start of this new role, I hadn’t done this exercise; the first few months were a blur.
It has been my experience that leadership traits that make someone successful in one organisation, may not necessarily have the same success in another organisation. That can be attributed to whether your leadership traits complement the organisation’s leadership DNA. While I can’t provide a textbook definition of this concept, it can be individually articulated through the answers to the following questions:
What are the Company’s values and the team/department’s values? (note: these ‘should’ be the same but most times, are not.)
What is the leadership profile of your Company? Look around the C-Suite, Exec team, Senior Management team – what are the common traits of success among these individuals? Yes, organisations are meant to have diverse teams but there are always common traits beyond race and gender.
What does the Company culture look like? What are its values? Can you articulate these? Not what’s on the website but what is done in practice.
What are your leadership traits? What feedback have you received, in the past, as a leader? List those traits.
Hopefully, by answering questions 1 – 3, you can identify some common themes and threads. Then, compare these to the answers to question 4; are there any crossovers or complementary traits?
An illustrative example: I once worked for a FTSE100 company, and one of their values was Bias for Action; this was stated on their website, internal comms, and a KPI for performance reviews. Individuals who were considered good, successful leaders embodied this trait. Before joining, I didn’t have a phrase to describe my ability to take action over inaction, to take a risk with minimum information. I had a Bias for Action.
A good time to evaluate the compatibility between the Company's and your leadership DNA is in the dating stage, i.e., probation. It has been my experience that having a few crossovers between you and the organisation aids success in a role.
Have you ever thought about this? Is this concept new or old hat?
Please share your response in the comments below.
Till next Tuesday!
Pursuit x