Three Levels of Leadership Maturity
We talk a lot about leadership, and we read even more. Theories abound and advice from experienced and persuasive leaders floods our bookstores and clogs our social media feeds. And yet we continue to struggle to understand leadership and to effectively put theory and advice into practice.
Senior people often talk about the need for ‘leaders at all levels’. This elicits a range of responses from those deep in the organisation ranging from ‘isn’t that your job?’ through to ‘I’m not a leader, I’m just doing my job’. We think we’re fostering empowerment and driving high performance when we say such things, and then wonder why nothing changes.
Over the years my thinking around leadership has evolved to understand that leadership isn’t the same for all.
When working with organisations to build, enhance and sustain leadership capability the first step is to answer, ‘what capability is needed, at what level for what outcome?’ To answer these questions, I draw on my three levels of leadership maturity:
1. Leading self which focuses, as the name suggests, on understanding self and your impact as a leader on others and team outcomes
2. Leading teams which is about improving team performance through understanding team strengths and fostering collaborative leadership including where the most senior person in the team is not always the ‘leader’
3. Leading within and across organisations, focusing on collaborating with leaders to set, drive and deliver on the strategic direction.
What inevitability happens in many organisations is that levels 1 and 2 become the domain of team leaders and middle managers, and level 3 is the sole focus of executives. What is also interesting is that, again in practice rather than intent, the value we place on levels 1 and 2 often reduces the more senior and more experienced we are.
Organisational leaders, top to bottom, need to shift through the maturity levels in such a way that level 1 becomes the foundation for level 2 and level becomes the foundation for level 3. Helpful advice to middle managers about improving their performance at levels 1 and 2, needs to be supported by executives demonstrating their expertise at these levels. This also means that collaborative decision making can no longer be the sole domain of executives – but that is a topic for another article!
From an intuitive perspective this all makes sense. There is a need to foster middle manager maturity at level 3 – it is not the sole domain of executives. And conversely, we need to place stronger expectations on executives to possess the foundational capability of levels 1 and 2.