Seven behaviours of the catalyst
Over half way through season 4 and a quick reminder of where Catalytic Leadership sits within the Energy Leadership system.
Right back at the beginning of season 1 we reflected on an employment world that was burning out and burning through employees. For the past decade we’d reached out to productivity and time-management tools and techniques to save us but the effectiveness of these is constrained by our own humanity and physical fragility and the impossibility of creating more than 24 hours in a day.
Energy Leadership by contrast invites you to consider that the way to solve bigger problems is through managing energy rather than managing time. It starts with you at the core and your own behaviours that contribute to your energy levels. Then creative energy that opens up solutions to problems and new pathways and possibilities. Then connective energy that allows us to forge alliances with different people and interest groups, compounding these to create more impact. And finally catalytic energy which sews the seeds of behaviour in those around you so they create their own vortices of new energy and that multiplier effect sees huge things happen.
This episode is all about catalytic behaviours. So you have your team. You’ve decided to be a catalytic leader but what exactly are you trying to cultivate – is there a checklist of some kind that can help you cultivate a catalytic spirit in your team. Well here goes and in no particular order:
1. SEARCH AND REALISE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE at the pace of change in the world right now the best ideas are outside not just inside your organisation. Encourage your team through your example to rethink who are your competitors, not just those you have now but those converging on your space. Some catalytic leaders devote a day a month to field trips – everyone in the team goes out exploring, whether physically or online and brings back from their safari a plethora of ideas, questions, photos, observations that fuels not just a better understanding of what’s out there but also the creative spark to imagine better.
2. EMBRACE COMPLEXITY your organisation is complex and so is everyone else’s and the biggest opportunities are going to be seized by people who can seize, embrace and handle complex moving parts. Here we’re looking for cut through complexity not cutting out complexity. Cutting it out or ignoring risks creating problems down the line or downsizing the opportunity until it fits your accepted notion of complexity. Rarely are problems solved with simple if-thens. Consider bringing in design thinking techniques such as swim-lanes that help you visualise the impact on moving parts within your organisation so you can prepare and tweak proposals and reveal new opportunities for different stakeholders
3. SUPPORT THE GROWTH MINDSET research continues to show optimism, which can be learned, tends to lead towards better calculated risk thinking, higher sales, higher productivity even in doctors more accurate diagnoses and treatment strategies. This is powerful stuff. At all times, your team should have a series of short-term learning experiments on the go – celebrate the winning experiments and the learning that came from trying something and figuring out quickly it was a stinker or needed a careful bit of pruning. Encourage the challenge of ideas over the challenging of people
4. BE FUTURE FOCUSSED the past is something that should and can be leveraged to create a more interesting, profitably and dynamic future – it’s something to learn from as we move forward. Look for the learning in your team, how are they researching, exploring and embracing the cutting edge or even finding out where that edge is? As part of your safari planning days, a good exercise to challenge people is the What If game. Take a constant assumption within your organisation and then imagine one of those constants was no longer true – it’s the what if question. And then ideate the opportunities that this could present. The natural tendency is to go into threat and defensive mode but keep everyone focussed on opportunities to drive forward that creative thinking. Here’s an example – what if the government eliminated cash – imagine your services being delivered in this kind of environment what opportunities / innovations would you be able to contemplate?
5. KNOW AND LOVE YOUR BRAND here I don’t mean necessarily just a logo or a strapline on your website but really the essence of your brand out there in the marketplace and what it stands for and is understood by people outside the organisation to represent. Ensuring you team are intimately familiar with the brand and its values will steer some of that creative thinking and experimentation – and coincidentally when out on safari do deliberately go research organisations that appear to have completely opposite brands or brand values to you. The legacy flag bearing air carriers largely sniffed at the emerging low-cost airlines because they felt initially the brand values to be radically different but have gradually learned a lot about how customers prioritise different elements of service
6. MAKE RESEARCHING VISIBLE ok you don’t have to go round telling everyone the problem you’re trying to solve but when you’re encouraging your team to be out there exploring, ensure this research has a degree of visibility. Here I mean visibility within your organisation shows everyone that the organisation is thinking about and embracing the future positively. But also researching and ideating externally has the potential to signal to people that you’re an organisation intending to go places, aware certainly of your vulnerabilities but mature enough to see them and move and grow forwards. And this is highly attractive to potential new hires who will see your thought leadership, questioning and want to join you – just be ready to respond quickly should they ask
7. MAINTAIN ENERGY AS WELL AS FOCUS this means ensuring the team have appropriate rest points between bursts of energy and practicing all the good ideas outlined in season 1 of this blog but prioritising their own personal and physical well being because at the end of the day humans are not machines and that creativity that you crave needs rest to perform at its best. Look for how you can create changes in tempo through the rhythm of the week or the month – whether that’s a safari day, a wild ideas morning, an inspirational speaker one afternoon coupled with the WhatIf game afterwards to keep everyone on their toes. Think interval training for the team
There are doubtless many more things you can do but for this episode seven I’ll stop here at seven things that you can start to adopt over the next month. Focussing on these things with your team will encourage them to practice the same within the circles they inhabit – allowing more growth without you necessarily needing to be in every room. And that’s the catalytic leadership behaviour we’re after.
