Lesson 2
Lesson Two: Developing Visible Leadership Day to Day
Welcome to Lesson Two of the Visible Leadership course. In Lesson One, you learned about the concept of visible leadership and began the process of understanding your own visibility. You explored the need to connect your value generation and the path to visibility with your organization's goals.
Lesson Overview
In this lesson, you'll learn more about how you can develop your visible leadership on a daily basis through a four-box visible leadership model. You'll reflect on the importance of visible leadership in relation to performance management, and you'll learn a reflection technique to enhance your leadership abilities.
Showcasing Visible Leadership
Understanding and showcasing how to be a visible leader can involve seemingly simple actions, such as the way you think and act on a daily basis. It involves:
How you lead your team
Engagement with your stakeholders
Creating artifacts to help embed your visible leadership capabilities
Building Trust Through Visibility
In Lesson One, you learned about trust as an outcome of visible leadership. An extension of building trust with your teams, leader, and stakeholders is following through on any promises you make. Doing so enables you to demonstrate and make visible your ability to commit and follow through. Being able to do so reinforces trust between you and any recipients of your commitments.
The Four-Box Visible Leadership Model
An important step on your journey to building more visibility as a leader is understanding where you are now and where you want to be to enhance your leadership abilities.
The Deliberator
Do you take a while to make decisions? Do you want as much information as possible and prefer to put that information in sequence? If so, you may be a Deliberator.
As a Deliberator:
When you do make a decision or share information, people are likely to trust you because of your value in piecing things together.
However, because your approach takes time and consideration, you may miss some opportunities by not working at pace.
The Fast Mover
On the other hand, you might be someone who works fast, turns things around quickly, accepts all requests that come in, and maybe you love being busy. But consider:
What about your team and your stakeholders? Are they on the same page?
Do they know what and when they need to be ready?
Is anyone following, or are you too far out in front?
Challenges for the Fast Mover:
You're often too busy to plan, which may result in missed steps or lack of clarity on how others can help.
This approach can be exhausting and may set you up for working in silos because no one else can keep up.
It doesn't showcase you as a visible leader who's setting a sustainable pace.
The Planner
If you're someone who likes to create a vision and then work out how to get there, then you're probably doing a lot of planning. As a Planner:
Ideally, you're setting a direction that's aligned to the organization's strategy.
You take into account who can help you achieve that plan and how they can do so.
You showcase your ability to conceptualize a problem or opportunity and then work through how to deliver it.
The greater opportunity is being able to demonstrate how your plan has contributed to achieving the desired outcome.
The Networker
Are you in the "it's who you know" camp? Understanding that you can go better and faster together, you might be a Networker. As a Networker:
You are the person with the contacts, who can bring in others to help.
You know where the good people and the good opportunities are.
Your challenge is to balance your ability to engage people and connect with them, but also to get the work done. You don't want to be known only as someone who's always working in the background to enable things to happen behind the scenes without showcasing your own contributions.
Integrating Leadership Styles
In essence, taking attributes from each of these aspects of visibility is the most productive and effective way of operating. Different circumstances will require different skill sets. Your job as a leader is to understand your defaults—what you do and how you operate when you're "in it"—and then work out how to leverage, learn, or borrow skills from others to better deliver on your objectives for the longer term.
Role Modeling as a Leader
In Lesson One, you learned about the importance of role modeling. As a leader, you have a responsibility to role model the behaviors that your organization deems important. You're often responsible for cascading organizational information to your teams. Doing so provides a great opportunity to be transparent, to give people all the information that you can, and help people connect the message that's being delivered with their day-to-day work.
Sharing Information Openly
Sharing openly is a simple way to alleviate distrust and anxiety, especially in times of change. It demonstrates how you value your teams by understanding their need for information and shows that you trust them with any information you share.
People are often interested in:
The source of information
How decisions were made and who made them
Where possible, try to involve others in decision-making. Use methods like co-design and creating engagement opportunities. If someone's part of a solution, it's far more impactful than just being told what to do. Even in circumstances where you aren't able to be part of the decision-making process, being able to understand the rationale for any decision is always a better way to influence an outcome.
Influencing Team Behavior
Your team members and colleagues are also exhibiting their own commitment to visible leadership. Your team's behavior is highly likely to be influenced by you. If you can show up and exhibit the kinds of behaviors that you're interested in cultivating, people will follow along with you. This can include simple things like:
Contributing in meetings
Being visible on screen
Offering to resolve team issues
Being accountable for completion of their own work
Being Across the Work of Your Team and Others
Another way to demonstrate visible leadership is by being across the work of your team and other teams or departments. Understanding what they are doing and how they are contributing is crucial. In circumstances where demand is high, there are blockers or issues, or work may not be flowing as it might, each of these situations presents opportunities to potentially streamline work.
Setting Up Governing Structures
Setting up governing structures, agreeing on how work works for you and others, and working quickly and effectively with others on continuous improvement initiatives can all help bring visibility to where you've improved as an organization. You might consider:
Using lean and agile techniques to better manage workflow from ideation to delivery
Setting up a cadence for shared decision-making, such as prioritization or steering committees
Developing processes to streamline handovers between your team and others
Specifying all requirements to alleviate the need for back-and-forth communication
These activities help build your credibility as a visible leader who's willing to get in and do the work to help agree on shared objectives.
The Visible Leadership Model
Outlined here is a depiction of how work breaks down from the organizational strategy to day-to-day focus for individual team members. Being aware of how the work of you and your team contributes to the organization's goals is critical.
The workflow moves from:
The customer and organizational strategy
Through the value stream
To the individual
Having visibility of how that workflow moves and your role in this process can alleviate any confusion. If you don't currently have this visibility, find the teams and the people within your organization who can help you map where your work fits. You might:
Create your own version of this kind of model
Set up governing structures
Agree on workflows and processes
Ensure alignment on problems and ways of working
Conclusion
As we leave Lesson Two, I encourage you to think through how you can build visible leadership into your day-to-day activities with tactics similar to those outlined in this lesson. Good luck, happy visible leadership days, and I look forward to seeing you become more visible soon.