Doing “the Donna” for leadership success
We all know that the true power behind the throne of any C suite leader, is the Executive Assistant or Executive Officer.
Many a CEO or team leader would benefit from adopting the tactics of Donna in the hit TV show, Suits. Always ready to listen or lend a helping hand, Donna observes every aspect of her work environment — interpersonal dynamics, individual moods and behaviours and situational responses — contextualising them within her understanding of the external operating environment and emerging trends. Consequently she is able to easily and quickly sense and make meaning out of a range of disparate data, to regularly rescuing her boss from near disaster or reposition the firm.
A privilege given, leadership is not about status, power and respect. Instead it is about acting with humility, so that individuals and resources can fulfil their highest potential and symphonically collaborate to create value adding products and services.
Effective leadership is less about strategy and more about mastering of the art of organisational kintsugi.
Inherent within any organisation is trauma. Arising from the friction created whenever two individuals interact with one another, this trauma, if left untreated can become toxic.
The friction does not need to be anything dramatic, it can be as minimal as a disagreement over what time a meeting should be held. However as these low level frictions culminate and combine with more deeply felt frictions, they compound and degenerate; a situation that can easily spin out of control.
And just as individuals store memories of perceived past injustices or hurts, so too does the distributed mind. The collective mind that is timeless and ever evolving to include new members (including those in extended supply chains or outsourced service providers), stores shared beliefs, values and norms as well as a full repository of memories of hurts. Nothing is forgotten nor forgiven, instead every new interaction, engagement or action is informed by this shared understanding of the past. Operating in both the conceptual and physical medium, these contagious shared beliefs and hurts manifest in organisation systems, structures and strategies impacting execution and performance.
The leader’s role is to resolve these frictions and truamas before they become toxic thus avoiding a circumstance where an entire team or worksite is infected by a rigid negativity…
