Leadership in View: Making the Invisible Visible...

Not all ‘Things’ are Visible

My youngest son, currently finishing his degree at home in our attic bedroom, was keen to talk through a chapter of his dissertation on institutional memory. Sometimes he likes to articulate the work he’s doing, talk, and make sense of it out loud… I always find him interesting and I’m happy to listen.

'“t's not a 'thing',” he told me, “I can’t describe it; but I’ve identified, and I am describing three effects of it and how they change over the period.”

I almost laughed, actually, because it’s exactly the language I might use with someone who comes to talk about leadership…

…just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

In leadership, just like my son’s history dissertation, we can sometimes only see the effects of something, and so, in order to analyse or understand, we need to go upstream to see where those effects are coming from.

And that’s where we have leverage to change.

All of those things we talk about in organisations, things we want to see more (or less) of, are usually the effects of something upstream.

When my clients talk about wanting to explain (usually to a boss in a performance review) the impact of their leadership and how they have been growing and developing, I tell them to look to the effects. Collaboration, connection, innovation, well-being, performance, results, resilience…

Is it working? And how would you know?

If, however, they want to influence something on the outside, something visible, I tell them to look to who they are and to understand the human dynamics of people at work.

That’s where the leverage is.

Making the Invisible Visible (it’s your job!)

There's rarely, if ever a thing we can see called ‘leadership’; we can’t describe its physical form, you couldn’t tell me its shape, how many angles it has, how much it weighs or the its chemical formula. You would laugh I’m sure, and we could laugh together.

But the effects of it are fully visible for us to notice and, of course, have opinions about.

How well do your team work together, how creative are they, how quickly do they bounce back, and what kinds of outputs are you creating together?

Regardless of the how you feel about the answer to any of those questions, there’s no denying the visible impacts of this invisible thing we are all tapping into when we turn up for work.

We know it when we feel it, and we can describe and quantify the effects of this invisible movement of ideas and experience.

And…?

This is what you do every day, it's what I shine a light on when I'm coaching and training—this 'playing with stardust' as I sometimes call it.

The better we understand this invisible innate intelligence, this 'thing' that creates all the magic in our lives and work, the better we will become at cultivating and utilising it, call it leadership or whatever you want.

What do you see when you look for leadership?

Are you seeing the ‘thing’, or the effects? And how do you then draw out and play with something that’s invisible?

That’s the game here!

Enjoy.

With love,

Cathy