Cassandra Voices

Tag: leadership

  • 360-Degree Leadership in Times of Crisis

    ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ – it takes a lot more than these kind of words today to get listened to, followed, and to exert influence and effectiveness over time. Effective change leaders remove barriers to employee success. Leaders of unsuccessful change tend to focus on results, and more often than not employees don’t get the supports they need for change. ‘Process’ and ‘people’ components of leadership are both equally critical, and therefore hard to prioritise since in reality they run parallel.

    A 360-Degree Leader

    The qualities that a 360-degree leader possesses, as per John Maxwell’s work, include adaptability, discernment, perspective, communication, security, resourcefulness, maturity, endurance, and the ability always to be counted on. This list is certainly not exhaustive but does capture the essentials.

    The difficulty in generalising this skillset is that they can differ across markets, crises, industry, and perspectives in specific contexts. For such individuals, who are or aim to become 360-degree leaders, there is also a form of assessment that provides feedback in which their skills, effectiveness and influence as an executive, leader or manager are evaluated. This is an effective process in organisations to give leaders clear feedback from their peers, employees and managers. At the same time, this is mostly done in context, e.g. how any process is conducted for a Human Resources director would differ from Sales Leader or Communications Head. Both the process and feedback are tailored to roles and contexts.

    (a) Influence

    The role of influence is critical to leadership. It is not only about ensuring compliance, but also the commitment essential to drive change, and therefore includes the ‘people’ part of the change most. At the same time, looking at wider stakeholder expectations today, developing a ‘reward culture’ also goes a long way.

    In particular, when the immediate fire of a crisis is over the leaders must reflect on who rose to the occasion, who struggled and why. Several organisational roles will change post-crisis and therefore leaders can strategise who they want to be at the table both during and after the crisis to head to the new normal.

    During periods of business-as-usual, influence can shape and affect long-term strategy making, talent acquisition and retention mechanism as well as seek knowledge and business partners as fitting.

    In some cases, where exercising command is difficult, since leaders are working in peer groups and therefore the dynamic is different, i.e. not the typical leader-follower setting, influence comes out to be the strongest and the most effective trait that an individual can demonstrate. This is because it involves leading across levels, including peers involved in the same stage.

    (b) Operations and Strategic Management

    The effectiveness of good leaders can be demonstrated firstly by mobilising realistic and time-bound goals; secondly, laying out clear objectives and setting up the deliverables; thirdly, by building high-performance teams; fourthly by creating a risk-resilient company culture; fifthly by creating organisational knowledge building; and finally by creating a culture of value.

    For sure, however, these are not magic bullets, nor meant to address the challenges or promote business growth overnight. The strategies and planned action that leaders take within firms, whether a large corporation or Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME), would be largely determined by the stage of growth where a company find itself at a given point in time. In addition, building a reward and trust culture would make employees more confident in making decisions and not being risk-averse.

    Besides effectively managing operations, business development, consolidation or a strategic integration of mergers and acquisitions, new research by McKinsey shows that leaders have the following six broad functions: Aspiration; Inspiration; Imagination, Creativity, Authenticity; and Integrity. When it comes to either managing culture at the workplace or leading others through crisis, leaders also need to develop the right mindset based on introspection and self-awareness, which are equally critical skills. Several studies by Sloan and HBR show that it is the mindset, adaptiveness and change that leads to growth and, at times, survival.

    (c) Leading through Crises

    A crisis is very often systemic in nature and call therefore for solutions that are not quick fixes. In the business world, depending on the nature and scale of a crisis which can make or break a business in the medium-to-long-term needs careful identification and scrutiny after early detection signs become evident. Over the years, studies have evidenced that there is a strong correlation between organisational culture, learning, market orientation, the degree of risk and resilience embedded within the firms. The role of leadership is undeniably paramount.

    Most often, it requires that rare ability to dive and drive through the unknown against the known patterns from the past. Leaders should gain new insights, work through new patterns, and determine timely and effective responses to any crisis. For example, during the pandemic, the primary function of leaders of large or high-growth firms was driving innovation, exploring new markets, and enhancing market share.

    When the pandemic struck, the immediate focus shifted to reducing costs while maintaining the essential liquidity! Most firms, big and small, faced supply chain and logistical impediments, downsizing the firms and other operational challenges on a daily basis. All of this while working through health and safety issues, managing remote working and also offering empathy to employees and their families.

    d) Talent Recognition and Retention

    During team meetings it is a good practice to delegate to the right people and establish ‘who’s who’ and ‘who’s doing what’ to avoid confusion and overlap of roles. Leaders need to break through the inertia for business continuity today, while increasing the odds of mid-to-long-term success by focusing on the few things that matter most. Above all they need to listen to advisors and smart people to seek insight and information from diverse sources, and not only from in-group sources. Effective leaders always extend their antennae across the diverse ecosystems in which they operate, while also creating a culture of accountability and transparency during tough times.

    e) Leading Change

    Most research on organisational change, cognitive flexibility of both leaders and followers, and also managing fast change illustrates a necessary connection between the ‘process’ and the ‘people’ part of the change. These 3Cs that unite effective change leadership are a) Communicate – leaders and followers need a continual discussion on the larger purpose of the change and how it would connect to the organisational values, and more importantly establish the purpose of change by focusing on ‘what’ and the ‘why’. B) Collaborate – aligning organisational values with personal values is something that effective leaders constantly strive for; we can nonetheless admit that doesn’t always happen. It is a level above when cross-cultural leaders bring people together to plan and execute change going beyond barriers of borders and boundaries. They should also include employees in decision making and thereby in a way solidifying their commitment to change while promoting inclusivity. C) Commit – research shows that leaders who negotiated a change successfully are resilient and persistent, and willing to step outside their comfort zone. On the contrary, unsuccessful leaders failed to adapt to challenges, started a blame culture while creating a toxic workplace environment, and were impatient with a lack of results.

    f) Leading Remote and Hybrid Work

    With hybrid working becoming increasingly formalised, leading a remote workplace becomes a key priority. This sudden change in the working environment comes with pros and cons and is new to all employees. So they need leadership to guide them through the transition.

    If your business has employees with more remote working experience than you, let them take charge. Feed off their expertise and appoint them to your business’ remote leadership team. This is the time for them to step up.

    Have communication plans ready. Many employees will have an area where they can relax and have a quick chat with colleagues, and a separate area where they can discuss pressing work issues.

    Businesses can recognise their ‘at-risk clients,’ who can cope with this eventuality to a certain extent. Similarly, losing staff can have the ripple effect on a small business of losing a clients, leading to a loss of revenue. A lack of profitability, in turn, leads you to have to make hard decisions as to which members of staff are worth retaining. Maintaining a ‘punishment’ or ‘fear’ culture makes people afraid of taking decisions and being accountable for their actions.

    Leading Dynamic Capabilities in SMEs

    Research into leadership shows how significantly they can affect the morale and confidence of staff (or followers). This will depend on the extent to which leaders perceive mistakes either to be opportunities for learning or leads to them brutally nudging their followers, thereby damaging the self-worth of the latter.

    As Sir Richard Branson once said, ‘clients do not come first, employees come first. Take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.’ Leadership, by its nature, can cultivate the foundation of a culture that empowers employees to achieve the company goals and allows you to recognise how vital each of their contributions are to furthering those goals. At the same time, the pandemic showed how important it is for a leader to diversify efforts and strive to innovate for future success.

    The core of any leadership’s role is to develop dynamic capabilities that allow organisations to respond and adapt effectively to rapid changes to the external environment. This includes sensing opportunities and threats, seizing opportunities, and transforming the organisation accordingly. This is particularly important for SMEs who may not have the scale or resources of larger firms but can excel through agility and innovation.

    By embedding a culture of learning, continuous improvement, and resilience, leaders can position their SMEs not only to survive crises but emerge stronger. This involves empowering employees at all levels to take initiative, encouraging experimentation and calculated risk-taking, and maintaining open communication channels to gather feedback and insights.

    Inherent Volatility

    Markets today are defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Thus, leadership can no longer be confined to positional authority or tactical decision-making. It requires a 360-degree orientation, one that integrates strategic foresight, operational discipline, emotional intelligence, and which exerts influences across hierarchies and functions. Effective leaders today must navigate crises not just by reacting to disruption but by proactively reimagining systems, realigning cultures at every level of the organisation.

    For SMEs in particular, the imperative is clear. Developing dynamic capabilities is no longer a luxury, but a strategic necessity. These capabilities, whether it’s cultivating a learning mindset or institutionalising innovation, allow small firms not only to survive shocks, but to emerge stronger and more competitive to shifting market demands.

    Crucially, leadership in this context is not merely about managing transitions; it is more about stewarding transformation, mobilising collective purpose, creating meaning in moments of ambiguity, and holding the long view while delivering in the present.

    As Peter Drucker rightly opined: ‘The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.’

     

    Feature Image: A highway sign discouraging travel in Toronto, March 2020

  • Thought Leadership Required for Climate and Biodiversity Crisis

    The great English chemist James Lovelock conceived the Gaia (Gr. ‘goddess of earth’) Hypothesis in 1972, later developing this alongside American microbiologist Lynns Margulis. Later still, Lovelock, aged eighty-seven, was awarded the prestigious Wolston medal by the Geological Society of London for his pioneering concept.

    Now firmly embedded in the zeitgeist, the Gaia Hypothesis posits that unknown forces, popularly conflated with the idea of Mother Earth, nurture our planet’s physical environment to sustain life. To draw on another famous scientific analogy, it might be said that Gaia maintains ‘just rightness’ (i.e. ‘the goldilocks theory’) through righteous homeostasis.

    As Gaia approaches her golden jubilee, however – and James Lovelock edges toward his one-hundred-and-first birthday – the evidence mounts against faith in the concept of perpetual renewal; her resilience and raison d’être has been weakened after millennia of selfless resolve .[i] The precipice lies before us.

    Gaia has tolerated humanity’s repeated abuses, but only in recent geological time has her mood turned conspicuously (and literally) stormy.

    There are, nonetheless, grounds for hope. As Gaia’s health fades, Greta Thunberg’s rage burns ever more brightly. There is an existential ecosystem crisis to be called out, and Greta has risen to the challenge.

    A strange energy reverberates whenever this Swedish teenager speaks publicly. Her unflinching delivery is as riveting as a tense drama; her conviction is that of a seasoned stateswoman, with deliciously scathing rhetoric unleashed in staccato rhythm.

    Intriguingly, the voice retains the appeal of naivety. Significantly, despite and indeed because of this innocence, the overall effect can be intoxicating to grownups who thought they had lost hope.

    ‘Futile Nobility’

    Greta’s fury has burned a hole in the establishment’s defences. The fire she started has been stoked by public sentiment. A paradigm shift in environmental attitudes is now apparent, but worryingly certain world leaders have adopted a bizarre form of stoicism in the face of Greta’s resuscitation of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’.

    Against this backdrop, scientists’ noble pursuit of rigorous data to prove what may seem obvious can seem futile.

    For instance, in the recent Special Report on Climate Change and Lands, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), embodying the spirit of righteous scientific detachment, claim only ‘high (but notably not ‘very high’) confidence’ in the (surely self-evident) statement that ‘sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies.’[ii]

    There are other examples of such reticence. In the midst of the Sixth Extinction, following on from a century-long campaign of insecticide, a team of UK entomologists published a paper calling for more data on insect declines, state:

    we respectfully suggest that accounts of the demise of insects may be slightly exaggerated. Bad things are happening—we agree—but this is not the whole story. We call for hard‐nosed, balanced, and numerical analysis of the changes taking place, and for calm and even‐handed interpretation of the changes, rather than rushing headlong into the hyperbole of impending apocalypse.[iii]

    Selling Copy

    Political leaders such as the POTUS Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a.k.a ‘Trump of the Tropics’, who recently mocked his latest nickname ‘Capitão Motoserra’ (Captain Chainsaw),[iv] provide a jarring contrast to valiant scientific rigour. Sadly but no longer surprisingly, these leaders frustrate efforts to slow anthropogenic ecosystem decay. Sadder still, we are increasingly desensitized to the toxic brew of xenophobia and climate denial.

    Whilst posing less risk to the environment than ignorance at world leader tier, the disregard of the most bombastic commentariat is equally galling. Cue journalistic tropes of Alpen-crunching tree embracers, guffawing reference to Ireland’s ecological anti-hero, the Kerry slug, and glib ‘kill the whales, save the plankton’ slogans.

    Purveyors of such sensationalist hyperbole do so to sell copy. The shock-jock Jeremy Clarkson wincingly entreats Greta, with misogynistic undertones ‘to be a good girl, shut up, and [don’t] go out in a skirt that short.’[v]

    Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed ‘obnoxious, loud, and frequently fired ,’[vi] U.S. Republican journalist Michael Graham is another exploiting an angry white male anti-environmental constituency to garner a following.

    For his part, the POTUS has also sparred with the Swedish child activist, in characteristically unbecoming fashion, mockingly referring to this ‘very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.’[vii]

    What fun would ensue if the IPCC were to invite Thunberg, Trump, and a band of other incendiary speakers to a public climate debate. The Canadian clinical psychologist and global media star Jordan Peterson could provide ruthless post-match psychoanalysis to provide car crash television on a stratospheric level.

    I suspect Thunberg might decline the opportunity as a matter of principle stressing the irrelevance of idle words.

    Yet it seems we need Greta to stimulate our senses, deadened as we are by a constant stream of ever-worsening statistics. As an example, take these statements of fact: ‘Nature declines are at rates unprecedented in human history;’[viii] an area of primary tropical rain forest the size of Belgium was lost in 2018,[ix] and these losses exceed those from 2017 when an area the size of a football pitch was lost every second.[x] Is it just me, or do these harbingers come off sounding oddly banal?

    Here in Ireland, 85% of habitats, protected under EU Habitat Directives, are in ‘unfavourable status.’[xi]  Curlew numbers – whose reverberating cry was once a soundtrack to Ireland’s uplands – have declined by 96% since the late 1980’s,[xii]  and may go extinct within five to ten years. Such statements sting and depress, but many of us seem desensitized by over-stimulation in a mediated age.

    Eco-thinkers

    ‘Ms.’ Thunberg, as she is sometimes addressed with mocking respect by her dissenters, is inarguably an ecological ‘thought leader.’ That term seems to have been first used to describe American philosopher and early ‘eco-thinker,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was said to have ‘the wizard-power of a thought leader.’

    As we face down the ecosystem crisis, we need more environmental thought leaders to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Lovelock, E.O Wilson, and Dublin’s own Frank Mitchell.

    We need effective eco-communicators to recruit followers to the environmental movement. These new recruits could heal the fatigue in long-term activists – labelled as outré or leftfield by the establishment – jaded by the inaction of policymakers.

    With environmentalism mainstreaming, new voices can dynamise and nourish environmental stewardship on the heretofore disinterested fringes.

    Hearteningly, in May 2019, Dáil Eireann became the second legislative assembly on the planet (after the House of Commons in the U.K.) to declare a Biodiversity and Climate Emergency. After decades of numbing stasis, law-makers in this State with the power to instigate change seen to have committed to radical environmental objectives through Ireland’s Climate Action Plan,[xiii] and Ireland’s (third) National Biodiversity Action Plan.[xiv] Let’s wait and see whether long-term institutional failures can be overcome.

    As a career ecologist, I care as deeply for slimy moss, and eels as for doe-eyed dolphins or deer. All are a part of the web of life; even the wasps we love to hate play their part as aphid predators. Yet committing my life’s work to conservation has done little to allay a sense of powerlessness to bring about meaningful changes.

    And yet – with rumination over my own more unsustainable habits a favourite past time – I see that we can all do more on an individual level, becoming, like Greta, the change we want to see in the world.

    Whoever stated: ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ happened upon a problem and solution to the current biodiversity and environmental crisis.

    For the sake of Mother Gaia we must substitute kinesis for stasis. The power of one is the collective potential of all. Wizard- (and perhaps also witch-) powered thought leaders are at the ready.

    [i] Tyrrell, T. 2013, Gaia: Death of a beautiful idea. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029401-800-gaia-the-death-of-a-beautiful-idea/

    [ii] IPCC, ‘Climate Change and Land’, August 2019, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/

    [iii] Chris Thomas, T. Jones and Sue Hartley, ‘“Insectageddon”: A call for more robust data and rigorous analyses’, Global Change Biology, March, 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331456611_Insectageddon_A_call_for_more_robust_data_and_rigorous_analyses

    [iv] Tom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro rejects ‘Captain Chainsaw’ label as data shows deforestation ‘exploded’’ August 7th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-exploded-july-data

    [v] Clarkson, J. 2019 27 Sep 2019. The e world may be getting hotter, Greta Thunberg… but having a meltdown isn’t going to help https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10022396/greta-thunberg-meltdown-wont-help-world/

    [vi] Ward, E. He’s loud. He’s controversial. And he knows he’s right. Style Weekly. https://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/hes-loud-hes-controversial-and-he-knows-hes-right/Content?oid=1382305

    [vii] Kate Lyons, ‘Donald Trump tweet appears to mock Greta Thunberg and UN speech’, September 24th, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/donald-trump-tweet-appears-to-mock-greta-thunberg-and-un-speech-1.4028590

    [viii] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’’ May, 2019. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

    [ix] Niklas Magnusson, ‘Deforestation Wipes Out an Area the Size of Belgium’, April 25th, 2019, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/how-bad-is-deforestation-two-connecticuts-were-lost-last-year

    [x] Damian Carrington, Niko Kommenda, Pablo Gutiérrez and Cath Levett, ‘One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals’, 27th of June, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals

    [xi] NPWS (2019). The Status of EU Protected Habitats and Species in Ireland. Volume 1: Summary Overview. Unpublished NPWS report

    [xii] Unpublished data from Allan Lauder (2017) cited in O’Donoghue, B.G. (2019). Curlew Conservation Programme Annual Report 2018. National Parks & Wildlife Service, Killarney O’Donoghue

    [xiii] Government of Ireland (2019). Climate Action Plan 2019. https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/climate-action/publications/Pages/Climate-Action-Plan.aspx

    [xiv] Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (2019). National Biodiversity Action Plan 2017-2021 https://www.npws.ie/sites/default/files/publications/pdf/National%20Biodiversity%20Action%20Plan%20English.pdf