Illuminated Leadership is the key to sustained business success

What is your approach to leadership? Have you ever written it for yourself, told your people, or perhaps asked them to write it for you?! Many of us are not conscious of our leadership, yet this is the key to success – personally and for our teams & organisations.

Great leaders shine a light, rather than cast a shadow. Every day they live and role model behaviours that energise their people and illuminate their business – this is Illuminated Leadership.

So what are the key traits of illuminated leadership?

1) Set, and Hold, Vision & Plans

This does not mean writing them on your own (!), but it does mean ensuring that they exist, set by your team including you. And then ‘held’ by your team including you. A visible co-created plan, which leads to achieving the vision, enables trust and focus. In our VUCA world, the plan will have to change – that is fine – the team holds the plan, and consciously adjusts it.

Vision – what does success look, sound, feel, smell like?

Plans – How are we going to get there?

2) Set, and Hold, Purpose, Values & Culture

Similarly, this is not something you create yourself, but it means ensuring they are authentic, understood and harnessed. Where they are not yet explicit, work with your team to set them.

Purpose – Why do we exist? What do we distinctively bring to the World?

Values – What is important to us? How do we want people to experience us?

Culture – How do things get done around here? What gets rewarded? What are the un-written rules of behaviour?

Your role as leader is, for example, to ensure the Values are lived … they are the lens through which decisions are made throughout the business. When you have a team member who is not living the values, it is up to you to talk with them.

3) Enable collaborative teamwork, such that the team achieves results unimaginable for the individuals

All the other aspects of this Illuminated Leadership 10, feed in to create this. i.e. If the team co-creates its Vision and Plans, it is much more likely to run the plan collaboratively, than if they are handed a plan and told to go and execute it. Additionally, it is important to create an environment where people share their vulnerabilities & failures, as well as their successes – this helps to build trust. Trust is critical. Trust is the basis for resilience in relationships that encourages both interdependence and personal creativity. Your team members must trust each other. The way you develop your top team, and the way you coach your direct reports, is critical to create trust.

4) Create a diverse team

Start everywhere (!), and for sure, start with the leadership team. A diverse team will, by definition, bring different perspectives to the room, will represent the true world in which we operate, and will lead to better thinking. Diversity enhances the power of a team, because it is true.

5) Support and Challenge your people

It is really important to do both, consistently and at the right times, not just at formal appraisal moments in the year. Give support, encouragement and positive feedback. Seek to understand the context of your people – often behaviours in work are affected by stuff going on outside work. And challenge objectively when work / behaviour is not good enough – in that way people can learn. A great lens on this is the way Kim Scott talks about this in her book ‘Radical Candor’ – she describes the combination of ‘care personally and challenge directly’.

6) Spend time looking, talking & learning outside

Have great peripheral vision – what is going on out there, which could be useful to your business, and to whom could you be useful. Schedule 10% of your time outside the direct business.  Illuminated Leaders always have their radar on, they put themselves in to interesting new situations, they are constantly curious.

7) Spend time on people – selecting, coaching & clearing space for people to be their best

Get great people, ask them the hardest questions, and be there for them. Just because they are ‘high fliers’, does not mean you just leave them alone. They merit support and challenge too! Spend coaching time with them frequently – for your direct reports, at least once a month. Have a clear positive agreed approach to how you use that time, including giving each other feedback.

8) Make the really tough decisions

You are not here to be liked, and it certainly is not useful if you are dis-liked! Ideally you will be respected. There are times when tough decisions have to be made, and the team cannot do it. You have to. These moments count. Ensure you have listened widely and encouraged dialogue to inform and enable making the best decision, communicate clearly and transparently about the decision and its reasoning, and treat people with humility.

9) Shine a light throughout your organisation, rather than cast a shadow.
‘People do what you do, not what you say’. So treat people – everyone – as you would like to be treated yourself. People are watching you all the time. By what you do and say each day, you role model the values and behaviours you want of your people. The core leadership behaviours are outlined above. The values will be specific to your organisation. This does not mean being a candy floss leader who only ever talks about good news! There are always challenges as well as opportunities in any business, people will make mistakes, projects will fail. But when you bring trust, positive energy and a belief in learning not blame, you will shine a light that illuminates far corners of your business.   

10) If you don’t have a coach, try it. It will make a positive difference to your life.

Every elite sports person has a coach, why not every elite business person? The right coach creates a safe and powerful space for people to have the conversations they don’t have elsewhere. Conversations that will give them strength, confidence and concrete plans to enjoy and increase their success in the next and even better phase of their life.