Building leadership skills and a great team my way

Transparent and honest leadership is saying it as it is. Saying when we’re not getting it right, and being human and transformational for people around us.

We can’t keep looking to others for leadership if we’re not willing to ask it of ourselves. We can’t keep abdicating responsibility. When I talk about disruptive leadership, I don’t mean overturning leadership.

I mean being more effective, finding a more functional way to lead in our place of influence.

The key to leadership is not taking the back seat and criticising what it is we’re seeing, but saying, ‘In this space I can influence in a positive way.’

To want to tear it down is the most ineffective way of leadership we can show. To bitch about what we’re seeing but not doing anything about it. That’s dysfunctional.

So disruptive leadership isn’t about how to pull down anyone, it’s about how do we elevate everyone.

Leadership is about implementing what we know, bringing it to life in a way that is consistent, of a high standard and truthful. And the standard model I use to develop leadership ability and build a great team and culture is the Critical Alignment Model.

It enables us to access time and space equally equally, spreading attention across all aspects of it instead of limiting it to the problem or our perspective of the problem.

With the Critical Alignment Model, it is a forced choice. It forces us as potential leaders to stop doing our preference—the thing we're comfortable with, the thing we think is right—but to take care of every single dimension equally. If you use it, you will build a much stronger business and because of that, a much stronger team. And your leadership ability will grow up as well because you're taking care of four dimensions even though we all have a preference for one.

So, it starts with four quadrants that invite a Meta perspective, with the centrepiece being Our Purpose. The Vision or Environment is why this matters. It's values and assumptions.

Apply it to one action, say, answering the phone. The question to ask firstly is, 'What do we want to achieve?' If you're in Implementation mode, the answer would be, 'I answer the phone because someone's ringing.'

That is not the purpose of answering the phone.

The purpose is to wow the person on the other end.

Answering the phone is never a task. It is a mission.

Think of the story of the person who visited a beautiful cathedral that was being built. He asked the first stonemason he saw what it was he was doing. "I bre