How Regenerative Leadership can show the way out of a Crisis
What is Leadership?
“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.” – Steve Jobs
If you ask this question from few individuals, you will get different definitions because people hold different opinions about leadership. In Organisations there are people in very senior positions, with several years of experience, there are managers managing larger teams, managing day to day activities and there are individuals who are charismatic. Does that mean they are all considered as leaders? The position, authority, experience, managing people, managing day to day activities or being charismatic does not solely make you a leader. Leadership has been defined as a process of influencing a set of individuals to achieve a common goal. However, in my opinion, leadership has a broader meaning to it. As per Peter Drucker, in an organisation, only friction, confusion and underperformance happen naturally. While everything else requires leadership. This statement itself shows that leadership has a deeper meaning to it.
Leadership approaches
The term “Leadership” has been in existence since late 1700s. Leadership has been defined as a science as well as an art since then. Some believe that the leaders are borne and not made. As per Simon Sinek, The Leadership is all about transitions, Beliefs, Commitment and Consistency. For you to get into the shape of a good leader, you need a lot of practice. Therefore, the statement “Leaders are borne and not made” remains as a myth as the statement above clearly shows that leaders are a combination of both borne and made. Leaders are also about being rational as well as emotional. While you apply logic to your leadership, giving that human touch to show that you are with the followers to win the battle, helps you to become a better leader. This is where Emotional Intelligence come in to play which we will be discussing later in my blog.
There are many traditional leadership styles adopted by leaders since the Leadership styles were found. Some of those many leadership styles are as follows.
Autocratic Leaders, who are dominant leaders. They have a very sharp vision and knows exactly what they want to do. Therefore, there is very little room for them to not achieve what they want to achieve. These leaders also know how to get the work done through their followers. However, as they expect their followers to only do what they say, they do not encourage creativity and innovation. Hitler is a common example for such leaders who had complete control over the followers.
Charismatic leaders, even though charismatic personality is one of the key attributes of a good leader, they are not known as the best leaders as they are known to be more of egoistic and self-centred leaders.
Transactional Leaders, typically believes in orders and structures. They mostly depend on self-motivated individuals as they believe the good behaviour should be always rewarded while bad behaviour should be punished.
Transformational Leaders, are who believes in connecting with their employees to improve performance. While they encourage critical as well as innovative thinking among their followers, they also got a magic of looking at the future. They are also very keen in developing their followers. Hence, they make sure the followers are very much aligned to the leader, so that everyone in the troupe are in the same page. Therefore, they are known to be inspirational or authentic leaders. Barak Obama can be mentioned as a good example for a transformational leader who has a magnetic personality. These are some of the very important qualities a leader should have to survive a crisis. But is this all what is required?
In my opinion, leaders should be able to adopt different leadership approaches depending on the situation as ‘there is no one size which fits all’.
Regenerative Leadership
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” – Buckminster Fuller
In the old way of doing business, organisations put profit before the rest of the fundamentals. They worked towards very short goals. Even fortune 500 companies had set goals only for a maximum of 5 years. Decision making was more of a logical approach and there were high level of stress, anxiety and burnout due to the reason that the organisations were looked at a more of a mechanical aspect than a living system. Therefore, shifting gears towards a living system is what is required when it comes to Regenerative leadership.
With this leadership approach, Diversity and Collaboration has become a must have in an organisation. The organisations should always do business keeping people and planet in mind. Organisations should be more purposeful. Accepting the changes and adopting to these changes to be align with the regenerative approach will help the organisations to gain long term success.
Emotional Intelligence
When adopting regenerative leadership approach, organisations should be creative, unique, effective as well as be faster than the competitors to win the race. Singapore Airlines announced few initiatives such as transforming airbuses to fine dining restaurants to see alternative source of income while Covid-19 has severely impacted the airline industry. To do such innovative changes in an organisation, not only the leaders but also the followers should be adopting various qualities. Therefore, giving the followers the opportunity to come up with creative ideas, letting employees do their job with less interference, rewarding employees for their accomplishments, developing next level of leaders by guiding and coaching them and being able to proactively predict the future problems and looking at approaches to prevent them are important in this process.
Effectiveness and Employee satisfaction is key. Hence, Emotional Intelligence plays a big part during crisis management. Crisis will always have a negative impact on organisations. However, how you make it positive is what is important. Leaders should be able to look through other’s viewpoints and solve the entire problem looking at the future. This is very important when it comes to problem solving during crisis situations, instead of solving the problem just to survive the occurrence.
As per Daniel Goleman, there are five steps for Emotional Intelligence.
• Self-Awareness
• Self-Regulations
• Motivation
• Empathy
• Social skills
During the process of motivating employees, successful leaders will have to continuously monitor the behaviour of their followers to understand their needs and motivate them accordingly. Motivation increases the loyalty the followers have towards to organisation. Which in return improves individual as well as team performance and customer satisfaction through that. When the employees know that the leaders understand them, they start working as citizens of the organisations instead of employees of the organisations. This entire process leads to improved turnover of the organisation.
Crisis management through Regenerative Leadership
You got two options during a crisis. One, is to run away from the situation. Two, looking at possible ways to overcome the situation by being wiser. If you have selected to run away from the problem, you have selected to be degenerative. However, if you opt to be wise and look at humanitarian ways to find solutions to overcome the situation, you are being regenerative. This approach will be difficult, and you may have to go through many obstacles. Therefore, you need to have a stronger inner self and a very close relationship with the nature in order to overcome the challenges.
Crisis is something unexpected. During a crisis, mental thinking of people changes immediately. As a result, their priorities, needs and wants may change. It is important that organisations quickly identify the changes and adopt accordingly. In order to do so, organisations should first connect with society and people. Once you know the changes, then you need to see how fast you can adopt to these changes to gain competitive advantage. Furthermore, connecting with clients not only to do business but also to check on their wellbeing will ensure that the clients will stick with the organisation for the long run. Not only our clients but also an opportunity should be given to our employees to connect socially so they understand the purpose of what they do, and it will make them feel good about it.
Resilience is one of the key attributes of leadership. This remains the same when it comes to regenerative leadership. Leaders should have the courage and should be creative enough to be resilient specially during crisis situations.
Being innovative is the next key attribute of regenerative leadership. To be innovative during a crisis, the organisation should be able to do quick experiments to identify the required changes faster. To do this, as discussed in one of the earlier points, empowering employees becomes crucial. When doing experiments, it should not be only on the products and services you offer but also understanding the changes in the environment will give you the chance to explore new business opportunities.
Furthermore, analysing new challenges, re-innovations such as identifying what is obsolete and identifying time wasting projects will also help organisations to come up with new strategies as well as to look at cost reduction approaches which will help the organisations to balance their financials.
Crisis situations often create uncertainty as well as stress. Organisations will start making losses, cost might drastically increase, some organisations might have to give up on employees, might have to look at salary cuts, may have challenges related to resources. During such uncertain and stressful situations, the organisations should ensure ethical business is practiced. Furthermore, organisations should look at doing some social activities such as providing test kits and masks to hospitals during pandemic. This will improve the social image as well as the reputation of the organisation.
Summary
The above points articulate that even though there are many leadership approaches in practice, Regenerative leadership approach is key in doing business in today’s context. Specially in an era where we face many crisis situations. Therefore, to build the organisation for the long run, leaders should ensure that decisions are made not only based on profit but also keeping people as well as the plant at the centre.
What would be your first course of action during a crisis to minimise the business impact?
Reference
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