A recent conversation with leadership peers motivated me to share this because it included an important question.
When was the last time you or your organisation made a significant and successful change, breakthrough or advance, and what was behind it? Something that was not just a reaction but got you or your people outside your comfort zones, changed your worldview and quickly produced different results?
In our conversation, we agreed that meaningful change or lasting impact was impossible until we started to see things differently. It remains true whether your goals are personal — say, losing weight or getting healthy — or professional, such as finding new talent or transforming your organisation.
We also agreed that we as leaders needed this personal epiphany to reframe our thinking and mindset to help us do something different, or nothing would have happened.
This remains consistent in our family, leadership team or organisation. This is not due to others’ cynicism or lack of motivation to change, but to them not coming face to face with the new reality. Their mindsets or mental models have not changed to help them transform themselves and their results.
I am sure you have attended a course and got inspired and excited about a new technique or idea for which you could see the potential value or impact. As the senior leader, you share it with your peers or teams. Since you liked it, you send your people to learn it. But then you see minimal impact, or it is soon tossed aside or ignored. Your people may have seen it as nothing more than the flavour of the month.
This often happens not because the learning experience is weak or the ideas ineffective. If we do not help ourselves and our people frame our mindsets, it will fail. We will return to our comfort zone, which we were trying so hard and investing so much in to escape.
This phenomenon remains true whether it concerns personal productivity, culture changes, new work approaches, or our children’s screen time. In an organisational context, it is not priming leaders’ and managers’ mindsets for operational or behavioural change that kills initiatives.
Using the new techniques and strategies we produce is very much secondary to the beliefs and thinking of the people you will ask to make a new reality happen. Unfortunately, making this happen is hard.
Leadership is an honour, but it is not always fun. Creating new success is challenging, but it is not complex. When things go well, we can see the thinking and actions that create the new success. However, our outdated worldview, thinking and approaches remain exceedingly difficult to shake off.
Leaders and managers are all too often products of their experience and environment. The company they keep, and their leadership peers reinforce this identity. Implementing new leadership approaches means you need to overcome what the past has developed.
How often have you given the same feedback (or not bothered) about the same issues to the same people? It is not entirely their fault if their mindset does not change first. But changing mindsets is essential when it comes to building new skills and using them effectively.
Despite the very fundamental requirement of the job, leaders often do not communicate enough or effectively. Communication challenges make it difficult to:
- Get agile;
- Break down silos and correct misalignment;
- Change ways of working and staff;
- Understand what is happening upstream and downstream;
- Learn your customers’ new essential outcomes.
But just telling leaders to communicate effectively does not work either. Changes will not last without your leaders adjusting their mindset to see the need and benefit of improving communication. Any training or new practices become irrelevant unless you address the mindset first.
How often have you had to ask your people to develop new ways of doing things? As a leader, you may be sitting there frustrated because they do not seem to get it. I was so sad because many of my people were killing themselves while working so hard. Many were doing more of the old things. They were putting more hours into outdated approaches. They heard my requests, they saw the need intellectually, but their mindsets had not shifted. We should have done more work on their mindset upfront.
Let’s go back to the Agile example. It is impossible to work in an agile way if you do not develop an agile mindset. You cannot identify how to help your people unless you have an outward-looking mindset to help you understand them.
Let me share a recent personal example of a mindset change that helped me see my business more clearly and what was needed. It was a change that helped me let go of the past and let go of the idea of myself as the founder and having to do all. It helped me see there were other possibilities.
The result was that I brought in a CO-MD with a skill set I did not have. Our teams were energised because they saw the new CO-MD leading in new ways and this encouraged them to change their mindsets accordingly.
The bottom line is that organisations improve when the people in them improve. It all begins with the leaders. You cannot wait for things to happen around you. Change mindsets and how you see things. Act accordingly, and make things happen. Your mindset can change and help you become the leader your people are looking for.
Arinya Talerngsri is Chief Capability Officer and Managing Director at SEAC — Southeast Asia’s Lifelong Learning Center. She can be reached by email at arinya_t@seasiacenter.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/arinya-talerngsri-53b81aa.
