It’s time to make the critical shift from leading the business by yourself to leading an organization of people. At P2Excellence, we help you navigate the uncharted territories of organizational growth with clarity and confidence.
Leading with the whole brain!
I’ve been reading a lot about whole brain leadership lately. At P2Excellence, we’ve spent the good part of the last two years looking at how business change and disruption impacts leadership and leadership styles. It’s almost as if leadership roles were acted upon by outside circumstances where leaders would be put into a position where they would have to respond and adapt.
A lot of business coaching, and leadership coaching, is centered around that ‘reactive’ premise, with the promise of being better positioned to adapt to future change down the road. After all, in today’s business world, change is a constant…right? Change strategies, change management, and change leadership have become constants. Our emphasis today is to focus less on ‘change’ and more on solving complex business problems in new ways. Solving those issues with a new mix of people, cognitive perspectives, more ingenuity, innovation, potentially with greater consequences, risks, and with a higher propensity for greater outcomes, too.
What’s happening?
Data costs are shrinking exponentially, while the demand for advanced analytics is expanding (left brain-centric things). Companies are embracing CX, the customer experience, and EX, the employee experience, as a symbiotic formula to ensure customer loyalty, customer success, greater productivity, and increased revenue streams (right brain-centric things). That left and right dynamic – science plus humanism – is resulting in a leadership style that acts with the whole brain.
What’s that mean for all the leaders and aspiring leaders out there?
Become adept at the ‘art of people‘ and the ‘science of business’ and you’ll go far! Regardless of industry, market, or geographic location, leaders must foster and retain relevance and credibility as an individual, but also as an effective team leader.
The why…
- The disruptive impact of new technologies has increased
- The disruptive impact of new market entrants has increased
- The disruptive impact of constantly shifting customer demands has increased
- Investors and employees are becoming a business’s most disruptive stakeholders
It’s no surprise then that the pressures of effective leadership are not only on the rise but being closely examined.
How can today’s leaders lead with their whole brain?
Leaders need a new set of skills to nurture, hone, and apply whole brain thinking to leadership, to be more agile and fluid in the face of change. What that entails is:
- The ability to influence, coach, and empower others
- Being open to creative thinking and experimentation
- The ability to synthesize diverse thinking and perspectives
- Creating an inclusive team environment
- Being vigilant of the external environment
- Being empathetic and self-aware
- The genuine willingness to embrace and enact change
- The ability to lead others
- Acting on intuition, data analysis, and interpretation
- Critical reasoning and a deeper focus on outcomes
- Understanding new technologies and having the technology skills to accurately advise teams
- Having a clear vision and strategy for the team
- Making tough decisions effectively
Striking a balance
Whole brain leadership doesn’t happen overnight. It is a personal and collective pursuit. It’s an opportunity to combine the best of left- and right-brain attributes to achieve competitive agility.
Are you there yet? Want to know more? We can help you get there!
