To deal effectively with today’s challenging business environment, today’s organizations need leaders who practice: I CARE. These leaders embrace change, innovate through disruption, and expand organizational capacity to do more with less. They are broader in their thinking, multi-disciplinary in their approach, and able to energize and inspire their teams to break through to higher levels of performance. They express curiosity to challenge their team’s thinking, display accountability for their actions and team outcomes, learn from mistakes and demonstrate the resilience to continue forward. They maintain organizational and personal integrity in their operations, and, most importantly, display the empathy needed to capture the collective energy and intellect of their team.
I CARE embodies five key traits: Integrity, Curiosity, Accountability, Resilience, and Empathy. Together these traits can form a foundation for being a more effective leader.
“If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you.” —Indra Noon
Leading is all about achieving a goal through the collective efforts of a team. To be an effective leader is to recognize the importance of how you lead. It’s also important to recognize that leadership is a journey in learning, applying, engaging, and mentoring all in an effort to deliver breakthrough performance through a team.
An “I CARE” mindset of leading is grounded in three key tenets:
- Leadership begins with self-reflection.
Without a grounding in your own purpose and values, the ability to lead effectively inside an organization will be tested and constrained.
- Leadership is about putting values into action.
Leading is not just about articulating a set of values and posting them for all to read. It is not just about presentations in a meeting to rally the team. Leadership is about achieving needed business outcomes through a team, with efficiency and in support of the organizational mission.
- Leadership effectiveness is measured by expanded organizational capacity.
Leaders raise the level of performance of their teams beyond the team’s own self-imposed constraints. That heightened performance equates to doing more with less which creates the capacity to invest in innovation and new opportunities for growth.
Many of the experiences I share in the pages ahead are not unique to an industry or company. I’ve used them because it is in these daily challenges that we are most prone to quick decisions versus more thoughtful action. The opportunity lies in creating more thoughtful action in all we do.
An over-reliance on routinized decision making driven by an adherence to existing, routinized processes can result in what I have referred to as leadership inertia. Leadership inertia often causes stagnation in organizational performance. It’s a leaders job to drive continuous improvement in performance. Learning and building trust is an outgrowth of sweating the small stuff to be prepared when the larger, more complex and risky decisions arise. As Einstein said, “Whoever is careless with truth in small matters, cannot be trusted in larger affairs.”
Failing to commit to your ongoing development as a leader enables inertia. In times of disruptive change, inertia is the enemy.
Avoid inertia by embracing another tenet: I CARE.
I CARE 