Make people less hesitant and reluctant to execute on their responsibilities. Make people feel better equipped, supported and more capable to do their best work. Get more grateful and loyal team members.
"Bosses will demand you work harder. Leaders will empower you to work smarter."
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Reactive leadership is focused on putting out the fires in the organization, by solving problems and making decisions whenever there is a specific need to do so.
Reactive leaders primarily react to circumstances and make decisions based on gut feeling.
Reactive leaders belive that the essence of leadership is managing and exerting control over others, and that the best thing they can do for their team is get out of their way.
Proactive leadership is focused on preventing the fires starting in the organization, by planning and setting aside time for the focus areas of proactive leadership.
Proactive leaders primarily stay ahead and make data-driven decisions.
Proactive leaders belive that the essence of leadership is enabling people to to their best work, and that the best thing they can do for their team is to provide them with a healthy combination of support and accountability.
A proactive leader is working to ensure that everyone have what they need to do a great job, by improving the availability of role clarity, goal clarity and support.
A proactive leader is focused on enabling people to do a great job. This involves a continuous focus on the:
...of the people in their team.
Practically speaking, a proactive leader works continuously to ensure that the team:
A proactive leader can be recognized by the fact that she reflects the
...of proactive leadership on a day-to-day basis.
In concrete terms, this means that the leader is aware of how she distributes her time between development and operational work, and that she is protective of the time distribution she believes is appropriate based on the organization's current needs and her role in it.
Practicing proactive leadership produces a multitude of benefits for both yourrself and your team:
In our workplaces today, it is very easy to be reactive. Within minutes, your calendar can fill up with meetings initiated by others, leaving you precious little time to do any actual work.
Urgent requests land on your desk, requiring you and your team to rush to complete them. People start screaming and you need to scramble to make them stop.
Being reactive is easy, because you just ride the wave that other people have created for you. Proactive leadership takes work, because you need to carve out time in your day to focus on it.
Leaders with a reactive leadership style typically hold one or more of the following viewpoints/beliefs:
If proactive leadership is so amazing, you might wonder why there aren't more leaders practicing it.
Here are some of the reasons why proactive leadership isn't more widespread:
When we work, it's easy to get caught up in the details and the familiar, and not see the bigger picture.
Focus mode describes the zoom level through which you think about and organize your work.
Common zoom levels (from more detailed to more holistic) are:
Most people have a tendency to spend too much time in more detailed focus modes, and not enough time on the more holistic focus modes that their roles require of them.
For instance:
Data-driven development means using data instead of hunches to decide where and how you prioritize your development efforts, and to evaluate the impact of those efforts.
Organizational clarity is the degree to which the employees of the organization understand why the organization exists, where it's going, and their role in achieving objectives and impacting the mission.
Insight management is the process of proactively and deliberately organizing insight to ensure the best return on investment of the intellectual capital available to an organization.
Insight management means writing useful stuff down and making it easily available to others who might find it useful.
Organizational anatomy is the identification and description of the structures that make up an organization.
Where human anatomy describes the human systems/organs, their purpose and how they fit together, organizational anatomy describes the organizational mechanisms (i.e. roles, responsibilities, processes, etc) their purpose and how they fit together.
Organizational friction is the friction that workers encounter when trying to do their jobs, or when trying to change the way that their jobs are performed.
The amount of organizational friction impacts how quickly the organization can move, the rate of change and how much efforts needs to be applied in order to get stuff done.
A team playbook is a description of how a team organizes its work and what they have realized about their work so far.
It explains where the team is going, how it plans to get there and how the team is doing.
When sometning goes wrong in an organization, we can think about these failures as organizational bugs.
Organizational bugs are like a software/product bug in that an interaction with the product (in this case the organization) in a given context produces an outcome which is unexpected or undesirable.
In order to correctly identify organizational failures as bugs, there needs to be a blame-free culture throughout the organization.
An expectation is a strong belief that something will happen or will be the case.
When we talk about expectation design in the context of the organization, we are talking about the awareness and deliberate action of articulating clear and fair expectations of various role holders within the organization.
The Wecomplish platform is designed around the concepts and behaviours associated with proactive leadership, and aims to collect and organize the data you need to properly support your team members and develop the organization.
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