Is your leadership team inspiring and challenging your organisation to continuously change?
If your organisation is typical of how most organisations are led, then the chances are they are not!
The main function, perhaps the sole purpose, of leadership is to facilitate and inspire change. However, in many organisations, leadership teams are more focused on firefighting and operational management than on fostering innovation and adaptation.
As a result, most organisations are over-managed and under-led, with excessive management adding little value.
Shifting from Avoiding Errors to Achieving Excellence
In their business bestseller “Turn the Ship Around”, L. David Marquet and Andy Worshek invite us to envision a workplace where everyone engages and contributes their full intellectual capacity. This is a place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work – a place where everyone is a leader.
It’s true that many people find little fulfilment in their work, and for many going to work each day is something that they tolerate rather than enjoy. And on top of it all, when the primary aim for each day is to avoid errors, problems, and conflicts – it’s reasonable to begin questioning whether it might be the current leadership paradigm that needs to change!
Our world radically changed when our mindset shifted from avoiding errors to achieving excellence. Though it seemed to some like just a change in language, it resulted in a change in behaviour. Andy Worshek
Shifting the focus from avoiding mistakes to striving for excellence can have profound implications for organisational behaviour and culture. Rather than focusing solely on avoiding mistakes, true leadership entails striving for excellence and empowering every individual within the organisation to contribute their full intellectual capacity.
Empowering Employees
Imagine a workplace where every employee feels a sense of ownership and responsibility for the organisation’s success. This vision can only be realised when leaders stop managing and giving orders, and instead create an environment where employees are empowered to think, innovate, and make decisions autonomously.
It’s time to break free from the outdated paradigm of “leaders” and “followers” and embrace a culture where everyone is a leader.
Driving Organisational Excellence through the Power of Thinking
As L. David Marquet aptly puts it, “Excellence is achieved when everyone is thinking.” In our experience, thinking leads to understanding, and understanding leads to better decision-making and accountability. Contrast this with the traditional leadership paradigm, which often discourages critical thinking and encourages blind obedience. It’s no wonder that disengagement and dissatisfaction run rampant in many organisations.
Reinventing Leadership
For more than 30 years, we have observed that in the majority of organisations, “leaders” still think and give orders while “followers” do the work and follow orders. As Marquet reminds us, when something goes wrong, we simply ask leaders to give better orders and followers to follow orders better.
Generation after generation, employees have been conditioned to believe that their job is not to think, care, assume responsibility, or make decisions. This mindset persists because, day after day, we expect them to simply cut more and more stones rather than asking them to participate in building the cathedral.
Imagine for a moment what it would look like, sound like and feel like in your organisation if everyone felt responsible for the organisation; if everyone worried about the same things that the managers or owners worried about; if leaders stopped managing and instead created an environment where employees didn’t need to be managed or told what to do?
Creating such an organisation requires reinventing leadership and how we engage with employees. It requires fostering an environment where employees come to work each day thinking, feeling and acting as if they own the business.
Excellence is achieved when everyone is thinking.Andy Worshek
The Ninety-Days Approach to Leadership
At Ninety Days, we’ve been championing and teaching this transformative philosophy for over two decades, yielding results that are simply astonishing. By equipping employees at every level with the necessary information and education to make informed business decisions, organisations can unleash their full potential.
A high employee involvement approach fosters a culture of accountability, where individuals assume leadership, take responsibility, and hold themselves and each other accountable for their results.
This approach not only empowers employees but also enables leaders to focus on their key leadership behaviours: inspiring a shared vision, challenging the status quo, nurturing team growth, being exemplary, and recognising contributions. Central to our philosophy, this approach ensures that the entire organisation is unified in its direction, motivated by opportunities and challenges, and that all leaders are working at the appropriate level within the organisation.
Embracing a New Era of Leadership
The time has come to redefine leadership and usher in a new era of inspiration and transformation. By shifting our focus from managing to leading, from avoiding errors to achieving excellence, we can create organisations where every individual feels empowered to think, act, and lead.
Contact us if you would like to:
- Learn how we can help you to ensure your leaders are operating at the right level within your organisation.
- Find out more about how we can help you reinvent your leadership and foster a high employee involvement culture.
- Ask us any questions that relate to specific challenges you or your organisation may have.
