Lesson 3: Building Daily Practices for Visible Leadership

There are a couple of times throughout the year where visible leadership is really tested. Yes, I'm talking about performance management conversations. Depending on how your organization works, these conversations may take place quarterly, six-monthly, annually, or at some other frequency. What they all have in common is the opportunity to succinctly encapsulate the performance period to your leader, who will have their own version of events.

Performance Management Conversations

These conversations are where visible leadership comes to shine, especially if you've been supporting yourself and team members by undertaking good performance management hygiene throughout the year.

Ideally, your organization is practicing "no surprise" performance management conversations. This looks like conversations where you and your leader are aligned on how you're performing, and where any growth or development opportunities are called out early. So when you actually come to your conversation, you're not surprised, and that goes for your team as well.

It's alarming how often these conversations reveal a real difference in understanding about how people add value. I've experienced that myself and haven't appreciated it. But there are a few ways that you can prepare to ensure you have supporting evidence and data for your next conversation.

Preparing for Performance Conversations

In this lesson, you're going to learn a few ways that you and your team can better ensure you're aligned on what's important, what success looks like, and how you might deliver value.

Ways of Working

To mitigate any of those surprises, I suggest you set up a cadence whereby you and the team regularly check in on progress. Many of you are probably doing this already, which is great. This might take the form of regular one-on-ones, but you can also look for ongoing and one-off opportunities to exhibit your achievements.

You might:

• Volunteer to contribute to a showcase or some kind of team update.
• Invite your leader for a coffee or lunch for a chat.
• Send regular updates on achievements.
• Capture any compliments or feedback and share this information with others.

For your team, it might look like setting up opportunities for recognition and for sharing of progress and learning. That might look like:

• A physical or digital board.
• Providing time in meetings to provide shout-outs for successes.
• Asking stakeholders to provide some key feedback.

There are many little ways that you can showcase your own success and champion others to shine the light on their good work, progress, and learning too.

Reflecting on Your Work

Think about opportunities you have in your day or that might come across the week to model visible leadership. Are you early or on time for meetings? Are you demonstrating your respect for others' time by being on time?

If you run daily stand-ups, are you:

• Sharing progress with clarity?
• Creating or being aware of any opportunities for collaboration or to support others?

If you don't have some kind of regular team huddle to share progress and you think that could be helpful, can you create something? Can you create an opportunity for transparency?

Do you have a daily cadence of reflecting on the work that you need to do and the work you've done so you can capture your achievements and learnings in the moment? If not, doing so can really help, and it can help you see how you're showing up.

Sometimes we think about work achievements as the big things that have been completed, like really, really completed, when in fact these big milestones are the sum of many, many decisions and actions. As I've mentioned, life and success are measured in moments, and you need to capture those moments. Recognizing how you contribute on a daily basis is really illuminating and really helpful.

Have you ever been surprised about a performance management conversation and struggled with what to say, with how to capture what you've achieved, and how to present yourself as effectively as you might if you'd taken the time to collate your achievements along the way? Well, that's what the daily reflection is all about.

The Friday Flashpoints: Weekly Highlights Report

If we then extend this practice and look at our performance weekly, there's an opportunity to assess what's working and what's not, where the gaps are, what you've done, what's still a priority, and an opportunity to think then about your achievements and learning as insights. These are for you and for your leader to better understand how you're delivering value.

One of the most effective ways to do this is through a highlights report. The one I use is called Friday Flashpoints. It's no secret—it's delivered on a Friday. "Flashpoints" I use because it's just some ideas, some opportunities to showcase some points of achievement and some insights. It's not a full report that I create each week; it's just something to give myself a reminder of progress and also help my leader and key stakeholders, as required, understand as well how myself and my team might be progressing.

Why Create a Friday Flashpoint?

Why would you create something like a Friday Flashpoint to share with your leader, with your team, and/or your stakeholders? Well, because life is busy, it's full, time rushes on, and you want to make sure that you're noting how you're contributing value.

The Friday Flashpoint is one of the items suggested for you in your homework as well. Let's have a look now at what a Friday Flashpoint is. You can do this at the end of your week—so if you work four days a week or if you're part-time, whichever is your end of week—that's when you capture your activities.

They are a good opportunity to take stock and assess your progress. It's a great opportunity to celebrate your own milestones, and they could be really personal to you, to note your achievements as I've mentioned. This means a steady stream to draw on in terms of achievements, learnings, where you've improved in key skills, and you're looking at learning.

This also then helps you understand what you need to work on, where you might be feeling disempowered, and you need a confidence boost—you can actually dip into your Flashpoints file. I've found that good in the past. When you're not sure how to start, it can really help because if you go back and think about some of the other initiatives and some of the other things that you've achieved, what was the difference between a standing start and then keeping going?

When you need to self-promote, obviously it's a good thing to have a list of initiatives that you've contributed to, things you've done, things you've learned, etc. As we've been talking about in this lesson, at performance review or check-in times.

Components of a Friday Flashpoint

It's really just five key areas:

1. What have you achieved this week?

   • Key results
   • Any feedback that you've received
   • Compliments or acknowledgements

2. Value you've delivered this week

   • Quantifiable financial benefits
   • Other tangible benefits
   • Client or customer value
   • Internal engagement outcomes
3. Core skills or expertise you used to deliver these achievements

4. Key reflections

   • What worked well?
   • What didn't go so well?
   • Any gaps or areas for improvement
5. Areas for improvement or skills to enhance

The key here is that you're doing this every Friday or every end of week without fail from now until forever, or until you get used to thinking about documenting and journaling. If you start to establish this sort of habit, it really stands you in good stead for those times when you're needing that confidence boost. If someone's pushing back on you in a meeting and you're thinking, "Hmm, no, I know this stuff." If you need to self-promote, and for performance conversations.

Ongoing Planning Cadence

Let's think then about an ongoing planning cadence because this provides an opportunity for ongoing visible leadership. We've talked about activities on a daily basis and a weekly basis. Let's then turn our minds to fortnightly or monthly because this is a time when you can introduce retrospectives.

Fortnightly or Monthly Retrospectives

Looking back at a time period—it might be a sprint, a week's work, two weeks' work, or a month's work—and working through what worked, what didn't, and what you want to improve, and taking some actions. There are lots of ways that you can run retrospectives.

This might involve thinking through something like sprint planning. That may take a very formal means, or it might just be you and a couple of other people agreeing your priorities for the month. Or it might be a very structured process. Whichever way it's working, there are real opportunities to ensure alignment with key people that you work with, but also that you're aligned to the organization's objectives.

This kind of activity really creates collaboration opportunities and enables you to check in on progress of work outputs and ways of working. All of these ceremonies, all of these opportunities really provide an opportunity for interaction, for reflection, and for prioritization.

Quarterly Planning

From a quarterly perspective, a lot of you in organizations would be undertaking quarterly planning, and this really represents an opportunity for some longer-term horizon thinking, but also some really great collaboration opportunities across silos, across other departments, with people that you sometimes don't interact with that much.

The opportunity here is really to think about who in your organization can help you achieve your objectives that align with the organization's objectives. You're looking for who can help. Can you use this opportunity to ask pertinent questions about what's been planned and why? Can you demonstrate your leadership abilities by having the courage to speak up and question the plan, which is a hard thing to do if you genuinely feel it's not aligned, and that you might be doing too much, or it might be too hard, or it might not be the right thing?

Doing so can be a risk, but if others are also thinking the same way, and if realigning or cutting out objectives is going to result in a better overall outcome, then the risk is worth it.

Annual Planning

Let's look then at annual planning. What we're looking for here is annual planning aligned to an organization's strategic plan and key performance indicators, which is inclusive of values alignment.

Activities such as investment planning, budget planning, high-level outcome and high-level initiative planning all often happen in an annual planning sequence. Annual planning really presents several opportunities for visible leadership because you would not be alone if you've experienced where annual planning has devolved into some kind of battle plan and battleground, with everyone pitching their initiatives for the same pool of funds. This can get quite rough and quite difficult.

But could you look at this opportunity as one where you can start building your case study early and well? Or one where you might be able to say, "Actually, I could sacrifice one of my initiatives if something else genuinely looks and sounds better."

Can you also look for alignment and collaboration opportunities to ensure that together you might achieve and you might achieve better? Sometimes there is duplication across an organization. Can you look for that and see whether or not you can team up and collaborate for more and better outcome?

The planning activity overall can be fraught. You've got the opportunity to rewrite the narrative for you and for this activity.

Journaling for Reflection

All of those things are quite structured, and they take a lot of energy and they take a lot of thought. One of the things that's ideal to capture is what were you feeling, what were you seeing, and what were you doing through each of these activities?

Because you're looking then to really exercise that visible leadership that we've been talking about. If you start getting into really fractious conversations, or you start being quite protective or thinking from a silo perspective, that's not necessarily showing visible leadership.

The Practice of Journaling

One of the ways that I've used over time to capture what I'm seeing, what I'm doing, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling perspective is through journaling. That's a really powerful way to capture progress, to capture your musings, and see what's driving you.

The approach that I use if I'm being very structured is to think about:

• The situation
• The response
• The outcome
• The reflection

Which is all great. Sometimes I just write, though, or sometimes I draw. So it doesn't really matter what it is you do. It's just the practice of finding something that enables you to think out loud and think about something over time so you can start to see where things are working, whether or not if you are feeling anxious or cross, how did that manifest? How is that coming across in your interactions with others, with your team, in terms of how you're feeling about your day?

Journaling can really contribute significantly to your learning, especially when you're trying to grow your visible leadership. How did you react or respond in a situation? Why did you do that, or why not?

Taking the time to note what's happening can really help, especially as core themes and drivers emerge, and especially if you don't like what you're seeing. You've got the opportunity to step back. There's no judgment when you're doing this; it's just purely an exercise for you.

How to Journal

How do you do this? Well, you can use a notebook, you can use digital means, you can use a worksheet for journaling. You're looking to note opportunities, you're looking to note how you're feeling, what you did, what the outcome was, and then reflect on that. It can really help you map and monitor your plans—so who was doing what, when, where, and why.

It really also helps you capture your success in terms of the efforts that you're undertaking to approach a situation, to respond, and to reflect. So I'd recommend thinking through all of the opportunities that you can see in a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual cadence, and then think about those in a couple of different ways—in the moment, or pre each of those activities.

How you're going to go into these sessions—set your intentions. While you're in there, note how you're behaving, how you're thinking, what are things making you feel. Use structures such as retrospectives, etc., to really reflect for yourself and together. Then use a practice like journaling to really take a moment and do some deep and quiet reflection about how it is you're showing up.

With all of those activities in play, you will find some of the key insights for how you're improving from a visible leadership perspective, and you'll also see some gaps. You'll enable yourself to create more of a plan about how you might grow and improve.

Conclusion

So it's the end of Lesson Three and, in fact, the end of the lessons on the module for visible leadership. In Lesson Three, you learned how to build in day-to-day structures and practices to enable you to grow your visible leadership.

Next comes the conclusion and homework sections where you'll have the opportunity to cement all these learnings. So once again, I look forward to seeing you become more visible. Thank you.