Over the last six weeks, we’ve talked about the Leadership Alignment Method™ and where drift shows up in our organizations. The Five Moments: meetings, decisions, mission, conflict, and projects. But just knowing where to look for drift isn’t going to keep everything in alignment or get everyone back on course.
Today we are moving away from the where and into the how with GRAVITY.
Last week I promised we weren’t going to dive into the world of pop psychology and personality tests. And I’m sticking to it. But we are going to dive headfirst into leadership behavior, because that’s GRAVITY.
Hear me out, when I talk about leadership behavior, it has less to do with your personality and everything to do with how you show up when things get a little (or a lot) off kilter.
GRAVITY is not about titles or personalities, it is about those same Five Moments, just a deeper level. And since we are going a little deeper, we will also be talking about some uncomfortable topics.
We talk about a lot of things in leadership but it isn’t easy to follow through on all the grand ideas of what a leader should be or needs to be. One of the things we talk about a lot is clarity.
Everything needs to be clear. Clear mission. Clear strategy. Clear priorities. Once we have all this clarity, we should be on track for success.
The hard truth is that clarity just means it will hurt more when you smack face first into a barrier. Just ask the poor bird that left a full body imprint in the snow under my crystal clear window a couple years ago. It was so clear that the poor animal couldn’t see what was right in front of its face.
And there’s my heavy handed metaphor for the day.
The magic will come when we unpack it a bit.
We take things for granted. Not only in leadership, at work, or with our teams but with everything we do on a regular basis. It’s like the “how to make a sandwich” demonstration that never results in a halfway decent sandwich.
We take for granted that because we are clear about the mission and the strategy that everything will hold together. We make an assumption that all we need is more clarity. Until we fly into the window.
What actually determines whether a team moves forward or starts to drift is something quieter.
Directional integrity. If you’ve been with me since the start of this journey, you know how I feel about corporate buzzwords. This isn’t an attempt at replacing the “clarity” buzzword with a fresh new fad.
Directional integrity is the consistency between what leaders say is important compared to how they actually lead when it counts.
Because when that consistency breaks down, direction doesn’t disappear.
It just stops meaning anything.
So we’ve set the stage. Next week we’ll start unpacking GRAVITY, I mean, it’s in all caps so you know I have a framework for leadership behaviors that keep us aligned. Here’s your teaser:
Grounded presence
Rooted purpose
Attentive awareness
Values guiding judgment
Intentional influence
Tethered responsibility
Yield without losing the center
Next week we’ll get into how these intangible, invisible ideas are at work under the surface of everything you do in the Five Moments. But for today, if you want to get a little bit deeper into the ideas of directional integrity and leadership as behavior, not personality…join me on the podcast.