What Type of Leader Are You?
Our Medical Team manage the health and wellbeing of many of Australia’s top tier executives so our teams have a unique insight into leadership styles across a variety of industries.
As their trusted medical advisors, our goal is to support these high performing individuals via practical programs which bolster their ability to maximise their achievements without impacting their health.
An article that appeared in Harvard Business Review back in 2008, titled “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader” by Deborah Ancona, sparked our interest in leadership styles and their impact on an individual’s health and wellbeing.
The article heralded executive leadership behavioural changes in America which our medical teams subsequently witnessed occurring in industries across Australia.
What was the premise of the article that sparked our team’s interest in leadership behaviour? In Ancona’s own words:
We’ve come to expect a lot of our leaders. Top executives, the thinking goes, should have the intellectual capacity to make sense of unfathomably complex issues, the imaginative powers to paint a vision of the future that generates everyone’s enthusiasm, the operational know-how to translate strategy into concrete plans, and the interpersonal skills to foster commitment to undertakings that could cost people’s jobs should they fail.
Unfortunately, no single person can possibly live up to those standards. It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person at the top who’s got it all figured out. In fact, the sooner leaders stop trying
to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be. In today’s world, the executive’s job is no longer to command and control
but to cultivate and coordinate the actions of others at all levels of the
organization. Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete—as having both strengths and weaknesses—will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.
This positive shift from a hierarchal leadership style to collaborate leadership style is a boon in my opinion, not just to a company’s
corporate culture, but to an individual’s performance, stress levels and their overall health and wellbeing.
To a Doctor, collaborate leadership sounds like common sense. “We are living in an extraordinary age of information and data overload. Our brain – the old hard drive upstairs, is simply no longer able to absorb, process, store and reproduce information in terms of effective decision making at the speed corporate environments demand it to happen.”
Again, to quote Ancona:
No one person could possibly stay on top of everything. But the myth of the complete leader (and the attendant fear of appearing incompetent) makes many executives try to do just that, exhausting themselves and damaging their organizations in the process. Hierarchical leaders were a product of their time, where subject material competency was often the basis for leadership appointments. The knowledge accumulation of the specialist made them the logical choice for promotion to lead others less knowledgeable.
“This developed a need for the leader to constantly keep ahead of the curve, learning everything that there was to know about his or her chosen subject matter.”
An engineering business built on say chemical formulae would continue to be run with the head guy always being the smartest guy. A good combination you might say if the person was also a good manager of others and reading a balance sheet. This dexterous character, would be able to say to themselves – “my knowledge is complete; therefore, I am
competent and I am the complete leader”.
The perfect environment for the narcissistic and the ego driven.
Then enter the world of the digital age, the big data age, where large scale information processing empowered the computer savvy to produce countless versions of solutions for any problem.
Suddenly no single person is capable of knowing everything there is to know about a subject and top tier executives have had to stand back and decide how to moderate their attitude and processes in order to lead others – particularly if others are more knowledgeable in key areas.
The age of the leader with the highest level of subject material competency running the show has passed, and in its place, comes the age of the Incomplete Leader.
The new incomplete leader is not only comfortable with the idea that they don’t know everything – they don’t want to know everything. “The incomplete leader’s greatest asset is their personality – particularly their emotional intelligence, as they know ego is the enemy of collaborative leadership.”
How have Ford Health teams used these changing corporate behaviour observations to improve our programs to support high performing executives achieve their goals?
By combining the essence of positive psychology with our longstanding evidence based medical models of care.
This new era of health programs aligning with performance management allows modern day “incomplete” leaders to be strong, flexible, and capable – while protecting their health – in these volatile times. Our programs unite medical knowledge, wellbeing ideology, and resilience training, to create an environment to not only optimise the health and wellbeing of executives, but to help future proof current leaders.
“When we combine ownership of health destiny with mental health literacy, awareness, governance and respect, we bring into play a new type of leader who is conscious that they are not an island, and that teaming with others is the path to success.”
This collaborative thinking is a far more potent weapon in the business world today.
The Collaborative Leader is both a proponent of knowledge sharing and empowering others to take up initiatives for common reward.
The collaborative leader can raise up and melt down teams to form new combinations – flexible nimble behaviours that today’s boardrooms demand in these digitally disrupted times.
And with the behaviour of leaders influencing corporate culture, the collaborative leader sets the example and passes their practices onto others.
“I have long marveled at how top tennis players or golfers could hit a ball where they want to, isolating the most vital variables of that particular shot in the quickest amount of time. However, it was also their shot before, and after, I was interested in.”
What if that shot was bad? How did they compartmentalise fast enough to let bygones be bygones? And how did their mind impact their next shot in play?
Resilience and flexibility are the benchmarks for sports and business superstars.
Which is why our programs don’t just tick the boxes for monitoring an individual’s key medical benchmarks – we are the scaffolding supporting modern age leaders be strong, capable, collaborative and flexible. Standardising productivity measurements may be difficult to achieve, as so many leaders are measured in ways specific to their industries, so what Ford Health does is assist the executive to develop their own measures for success, while we learn how to assist them to maintain their “true north” for their convictions.