Lesson One: Introduction to Visible Leadership

Hello and welcome to Lesson One of the Visible Leadership course.

Agenda

Today we are going to cover a few things, and it's quite a big agenda:

• What is Visible Leadership?
• Why Visible Leadership Matters
• Seven Ways to Showcase Visible Leadership
• How to Take Ownership of Your Own Growth Journey in Terms of Visible Leadership
• The Importance of Working in Alignment with Your Organization's Strategy and Purpose

What is Visible Leadership?

Why Visible Leadership? What is it?

Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to incredible speakers from Ambulance Victoria and the Air Ambulance Association. They painted a picture of day-to-day life for these very special people in specialist professions. Success in their jobs, which ultimately means delivering exceptional patient care, is largely dependent on visible leadership. This was a surprise to me.

The Ambulance Victoria Example

In the case of the ambulance officers, their minute-by-minute decisions can quite literally be life and death ones. So how does visible leadership play such an integral role? Well, the key that they outlined is really evident in how a situation is managed.

Whomever arrives first at an incident assumes operational leadership. This person may not be the most senior or the most experienced, but they're there first. If a person who's more senior arrives later at the incident, they don't assume leadership; they don't take over situational command, which might be the expected course of events. Instead, they operate in a support role. So there's a very big focus on followership as well, which is interesting.

The rationale is that the more senior person is unlikely to have the situational awareness of the first responder. Delaying treatment by swapping leadership roles or bringing someone else up to speed just because of seniority is unlikely to support the overall objective of caring for the patient as quickly and as efficiently and effectively as possible. This thinking permeates all handoffs through the patient safety value chain until the patient is transported to safety—usually a hospital or home.

What this looks like is the first responder will then transfer the patient to the care of, for example, an air ambulance officer. Leadership is then also transferred to that next responsible officer, and again, this person may not be the most senior. They then assume the role of leader until they hand over to the next professional, if there is one.

The Importance of Visible Leadership in Different Contexts

Now, you may think your role is different because you're never going to be in a position to be managing life and death situations. But thinking like that isn't hugely helpful, because if we didn't do something because it wasn't life or death, well, most of us would frankly never be doing anything.

The situation you may be in has some similarities. Your role may require you to manage people, teams, stakeholders, clients, or customers, and often, to get to the right outcome relies on several departments and several people across different silos working together.

If we think about the air ambulance example, this might look like assuming leadership and accountability as the first responder in a situation, and then ensuring a full, clean handoff to help deliver the ideal outcomes—it might be that the patient is safe, the customer's issue has been resolved, or the organization's outcome has been met.

From a visible leadership perspective, we all have the opportunity to be that first responder.

Defining Visible Leadership

So how do we define visible leadership then?

Visible leadership is the process by which you can be seen and heard by your people and across your organization. When you adopt the traits of a visible leader, you know that your team members are going to trust you more and more because if you're more present, you're going to get to know people much better. You'll know when and how it's best to intervene, how often, and how much you need to get involved so that you can optimize the behaviors of your team and, across the organization, how you might best deliver outcomes.

Being more visible enables you to be more available, and it enables you to demonstrate interest, empathy, and connection by ensuring that you can more effectively communicate and deliver impact.

Visible leadership is about you. It's about you in relation to people in your teams, your colleagues, your leaders, your customers, etc. It relies on you developing and undertaking a people-centric approach to your day-to-day engagement. It also relies on your proximity to those you're seeking to influence, to align with, or to lead. This proximity may be literal, or it may be figurative, and it aligns with how you work together—your work styles, thinking modes aligned to outcomes, for example. It's talking about how close you become with those you're trying to influence.

Contrasting Visible and Invisible Leadership

In contrast, invisible leadership is recognizing that you're unlikely to get much credit for the work you do, which can be tiresome and demoralizing. It may result in you missing out on opportunities, promotions, or just feeling less acknowledged for your outcomes or recognized for your contributions.

It's so easy to get stuck at your desk at work or at home, doing the work, especially if you're in an organization where meetings rule the day, and then you think, "Oh, I've had all my meetings; now my work starts at the end of the day." So you might be spending your days working away, believing that the work in and of itself will speak for itself and will pay off.

Personal Experience with Invisible Leadership

That used to be me. As people got promoted around me and over me, as people seemed to be having a much better time than I was at work and were provided with more opportunities for fun and for better work—all the while getting paid either the same or more than me—I realized there was something wrong. And that something wrong was really with me and how I was working.

I'd be sending emails later in the day or at night. Right-to-disconnect laws now helpfully curb some of this behavior. I'd only be having snippets of conversation with my team and my colleagues, and that really didn't serve anyone well. It didn't help me; it didn't help my team; it didn't help my colleagues; it didn't help my boss. Nothing was really working as it might have.

No one was seeing the outcomes of all the work I was putting in—hours and hours—because I was often tired, I was often hurried, I had my head down, I was concentrating. I looked like I didn't want to engage and I didn't want to be disturbed. I really was concentrating on the work over the people.

I hate to think of all the opportunities, big and little, that I missed and all of the great times that I could have had at work with more people. It wasn't all bad, but I know that there was lots of room for improvement.

In fact, I'd fallen into some of the very recognizable traps of an invisible leader—exactly the opposite of what I'd been aiming to be. So I slowly came to the realization that I needed to change my way of working to one that would enable me to show up for my team, for myself, my colleagues, my customers, my ideas, and my future self. I needed to engage, to be engaged, and become more involved in the life of my work, which required it and me to work outside of my own head and my own desk. I could no longer sit there by myself thinking I was doing a great job because being visible to your people has multiple benefits.

When you can start to see how people work, when you can have the opportunity to discuss and debate, when you can spend more time working through a problem, when you can review options together, when you can gather feedback immediately and keep abreast of progress—all of those things that you can experience first-hand rather than interpreting through dialogue through emails or through reports, for example—all of those things benefit everyone. They benefit you as the leader, you as a person; they benefit your people and they benefit anyone you're working with.

As well as showing your people and people across the organization that they can depend on you as a leader, they can rely on you to contribute in an aligned way. So working this way is a powerful demonstration that you value others and you value their work. And guess what? Doing so helps build trust with these people right now and also into the future.

Seven Elements of Visible Leadership

Let's look at how you might think through what visible leadership looks like on a day-to-day basis. Here's a model for visible leadership. It talks about seven elements of visible leadership:

1. Be Visible
2. Be Transparent
3. Be a Role Model
4. Create Connection and Meaning
5. Be Decisive
6. Set Priorities
7. Be a Clear Communicator

Each of these steps builds on the other. Increasing your visible leadership relies on a decision to be visible. It doesn't mean you have to change who you are, but what it does mean is optimizing who you are, letting the world see who you are by showing up and doing the work each day in your way, but also so others can see and learn from you.

Being Open and Transparent refers to being open and transparent with your successes but also your struggles, and also in showcasing what's working and what's not, and doing so authentically throughout the organization. People love to help—let them. Build a vision for where you're going and create the time and space for others to collaborate, to connect, to celebrate, and also at times to commiserate.

Thinking about Role Modeling—as a leader, as a boss in an area, you set the tone. If you're a leader, people will naturally want to follow because you're showing people what you think gets rewarded. Don't wish overwork or invisible leadership on anyone. If you're spending all of your time at your keyboard working alone, thinking you can solve all the problems and you can do all the work, you're not being a visible leader. You're telling your people that you don't value them, that this is the way to get ahead, and in fact, it's not gonna serve you in the long-term.

All these steps start and end with you. So being a role model is the outcome of your decision to be more visible and to operate transparently.

Creating Connection and Meaning for yourself and then for others really helps you engage and lead others and can influence priorities. And being able to share these priorities relies on your effective communication skills. Putting all these steps together, you can see that they're all intertwined and interlinked.

If you're thinking about where to start your visible leadership journey, it's within these attributes.

Taking Ownership of Your Growth Journey

Thinking about this growth journey to being a visible leader really starts with you taking ownership and accountability for this journey. It relies on your understanding whether or not you want to be a visible or invisible leader. You might be quite comfortable working alone, getting all the work done, and focusing on that. If you are, great—well done. But if you're not, let's think about how you can increase your visibility.

Auditing Your Time

One way to do this is to really get a handle on what's happening now—how are you working? I recommend doing an audit of where you place your energy and how you spend your time.

To do this, you need to watch and record how you're spending your time for a week or longer if you want to extend the exercise. If you don't think that the data from this week is typical, then you want to record data so that you can draw insights.

• Where are you spending most of your time?
• What proportion of your time is spent in meetings?
• Are you currently working mostly alone?
• How much time are you spending with your key stakeholders—with your team, your peers, your boss, your customers, people in cross-functional groups, people you haven't met yet?

If you don't like the answers to the questions you're asking yourself, and the insights you gauge are not where you want to be, it could be time for you to rethink how you might spend your time to better organize your day to effectively position yourself much more effectively as a visible leader.

Ask yourself whether all your work needs to be done first. I mean, sometimes it doesn't. You kind of need to ask yourself what happens if you don't do it. And then, if it does need to happen, do you need to do it? Are you the only person who can do this work? Is there someone who's more skilled or more able, or actually just wants to do the work? Could you be enabling somebody else as a development opportunity? Could somebody else learn a lot from doing something that you typically do?

Have you taken the time to prioritize your work so that you're working on the right things—not those things that you think, "Oh, I just need to get through these so I can get to that really big thing." Are you working on things that are going to generate value? Because that's what you need to be doing.

Do you really have to attend all the meetings? Couldn't a meeting be an email or a conversation? Could you shorten any of your meetings? Meetings are work. Sometimes people think, "Oh, I've been in meetings all day, and now my real work starts." If you're in meetings, it has to be seen as part of your work, and so it has to be something that you're really going to achieve something from and is going to generate and contribute to you producing value.

Taking a look at your week and doing something about it is really hard work. You need to balance all of the competing demands that you have as a leader. And there's a key realization that this is a balancing act, but you need to think it through. You don't need to just blindly say yes to everything. Part of being a leader is having that discernment to be able to say yes and no.

You need to realize that getting work done means sometimes you're doing the work, but sometimes it's through others and also in service of others. And you can't achieve this balance alone. You may need to learn some new behaviors to wean yourself off how you've been working to enable you to become a more visible leader.

Tactics to Increase Your Visibility

If this is you, then consider some of the following tactics. And in Lesson Two, you'll learn a few more techniques to enable you to cement your ways of working as a visible leader. But initially, some considerations are:

• Replan your week, and you're doing this so that there's more time for the things that really matter. Ideally, you're looking to free up enough time to connect and engage with those it's important to do so and to focus on your highest priority initiatives that are going to drive the most value.
• If you keep engagement as one of your top objectives, can you recast your week to better achieve this?
• Can you have a conversation or a phone call with someone rather than sending an email or an online message of some kind?
• Have you built in time with people just to relax, to converse, to build relationships?

Some ways to think about doing that are, instead of picking up a coffee on the way to work—which might be most convenient—could you have a coffee with someone at work or with even several people? Because this might mean getting a feel for the day—who doesn't need the coffee in the morning? But it also might mean building more engagement. The same goes for any breaks or lunch. Can these be shared with others rather than remaining at your desk or eating alone?

Are you consistent with your one-on-ones? Do you have regularly scheduled one-on-ones for you but also with you? Do you honor these opportunities to connect for better engagement, for better alignment, and for relationship building? Ask yourself how often do you cancel or rearrange these meetings, which are really important connection points because you think there's something actually much more important, and if you really think about it, there's not.

Do you have a process of getting to know the people that you work with? We quite often do this pretty well when somebody starts in an organization or in a new role. But what about during the week, during the every day, during the year? What are some of the rituals and some conversational cues you might build in to ensure that you're keeping up with others' lives? Not just a cursory "How was your weekend?" but real opportunities to build on the conversations that you're having with people.

Because what you're looking for are ways to connect to enable an environment for discussion, for healthy debate, for shared accountability. You're looking for time to ask and answer questions, and opportunities to enable more people other than yourself to get involved in the day-to-day. And doing so enables you to build better relationships which result in trust and support.

All these actions together help you build your visibility muscles.

Working in Alignment with Your Organization's Purpose

Part of being a visible leader is creating clarity and vision for others. Being able to set a direction with understanding and then working in alignment with your organization's purpose is a key attribute of visible leadership. It's really one of the key roles for you as a leader in being able to be a conduit between the organization's overall strategy and purpose and how each individual and team contributes to delivering on the organization's goals.

Ultimately, your objective is to create an environment and a daily practice whereby your team and wider stakeholders can feel a shared connection of working towards shared objectives, and to achieve the objectives of enabling your team members to understand how they contribute, how they're effective, and how their work is essential.

I use a phrase which is really a mantra for me, which is: "I want to help people come to work with a sense of purpose and leave with a sense of accomplishment." So the onus is on me to set up the vision where people can understand what their purpose is and then understand how they're contributing so they leave each day with a sense of accomplishment, knowing that they've added value to our achievement of the strategy which is aligned to the organization's goals.

Assessing Your Alignment with Organizational Strategy

In the homework, there's some key questions about how you can assess how aligned you are with your organization's strategy:

• Do you know how your organization delivers?
• Do you know how your organization makes money?
• Do you know your key customers?
• Do you know what the organization's biggest challenges are now and into the future?
• Do you have a vision for what the future is going to look like?

What you're wanting to do is then connect with how you can deliver on this plan. You're wanting to look at how you might co-design a strategic approach with people in your team to understand how you, they, and we might best respond to the organization's strategy. You're looking at designing delivery plans to enable each of the key stakeholders to understand how they might contribute on a daily basis.

You're wanting to build an aligned team cadence to ensure alignment with the organization's strategy and create a measurement approach that focuses on delivery of these aligned initiatives. And then, throughout all of this, you're also wanting to open up as a visible leader and showcase how you've achieved some of these ways of working that you're looking for others to embody.

Conclusion

That brings us to the end of Lesson One. By now, I hope you have a better idea of what visible leadership is, what constitutes an invisible versus a visible leader, and some of the benefits of being visible. Then you learned a way to audit your week to better understand your own visibility and the importance of connecting your work to the organization's goals to enhance your visibility and value.

It's a lot. Take some time to think it over and think about how you might change your day so that you can bring in some of these attributes to help you in your journey to visible leadership.