By Chris Butterworth, Stephen Dargan, and Brad Jeavons
As senior leaders working for many years all over the world, we came to realize we were often overwhelmed by the sheer size and complexity of what was expected of us. Today’s leaders face even greater challenges, with a continuing acceleration of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). As then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018, “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.”
For example, we are only just starting to understand some of the implications of artificial intelligence for the workplace. We also see additional pressure on leaders around environmental sustainability, psychological safety, and work-life balance. In this VUCA world, the job is getting more difficult, more time-consuming, and more pressurised than ever before. Unfortunately, multiple surveys show that global workforce engagement levels remain well below 30% (Gallup 2023).
We need to pause and reflect on how leaders can best serve their people, themselves, and their organizations. We need to cast a leader’s shadow that creates an amazing place to work whilst delivering sustainable, profitable growth.
Culture is at the heart of the Shingo ModelTM. Leaders set the tone of the organization's culture, whether they do this intentionally or not. To quote Edgar Schein, "The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening."
In the book Leading Excellence, we seek to explain how to create and manage culture in a simple and practical way. First, to be a better leader, we need to better understand ourselves. What is our purpose, and what are our values? These are the core elements of our “Core Belief System,” which was developed with the help of neuroscientist Dr. Mark Williams and organizational psychologist Lawry Scander.
We all have a core belief system that drives our emotions. Understanding this can help us effectively control our emotions, stay in a place of thought, and be adaptive leaders. Understanding other people’s core belief systems can help us to understand them more deeply. This knowledge helps us to adapt our approach and guide them towards their full potential. It is our behaviors and how we make people feel through these that define us as leaders.
Without a grounding in a clear core belief system, our response in any context will be an emotional one. Ask yourself this question: Have you ever said something or sent an email and then very quickly regretted it? We are all, first and foremost, feeling beings who have developed the ability to think. As leaders, we need to learn how to pause and engage our thinking brain to prevent an immediate emotional response. A deep understanding of our core belief system will help with this.
The first insight of the Shingo Model is that “Ideal results require ideal behaviors.” As leaders, we need to be conscious of the ideal behaviors needed from ourselves and respond in the appropriate way in every interaction to create and manage the ideal behaviors we need across the organization. Whilst understanding our Core Belief system will help with this, we need something else to support the building of a habit of pausing before responding. To help build this habit, we have developed the concept of the “5 hats of the adaptive leader.” These hats help leaders to adapt their response in any given context and reduce the risk of an inappropriate emotional response that will drive the wrong behavior. The 5 hats are illustrated below:
The hats are not in any specific order. The key is to be able to adapt between the hats as the context requires. A very high-level summary of each hat is given below:
Inspire Hat: Leaders in the most successful organizations wear the inspire hat consistently, embedding purpose in all their daily interactions.
Coach Hat: Effective coaching is about asking questions that help people to think for themselves and grow.
Teach Hat: Leaders learn something every time they teach. Mentoring is also a form of teaching.
Support Hat: Leaders need to understand when people need help and also use recognition extensively to reinforce ideal behaviors.
Direct Hat: We need to be clear and directive when there is a potential safety issue and when behaviors are not what they should be.
One of the Shingo Model Insights is that behaviors are informed by principles. We discuss in depth the Shingo Guiding Principles of Respect Every Individual and Lead with Humility, as we believe they are essential foundations for Leading Excellence. Leaders need to lead by example in demonstrating behaviors aligned to these principles and constantly manage and reinforce them through recognition.
One key aspect of these principles is seeing the true potential in every team member and creating strong development pathways or systems to enable them to reach their potential. This requires some critical systems to be in place, such as an Aspiring Leaders Development System.
Hardly anyone comes to work to do a bad job, but people’s behaviors are always driven by something going on in their environment. This might often be outside of the work environment. One of the key roles of any leader is to truly understand every individual’s intrinsic and extrinsic interference and “dance with it.” If change is to be sustainable, leaders must enable and empower their teams to lead the change. To do this, leaders need to have the courage to be vulnerable. Those leaders who do connect more with their people and build mutual respect.
The Shingo Enterprise Alignment principles of Constancy of Purpose and Think Systemically are critical to any organization’s success. To connect people to the overall company’s purpose requires leaders to take every opportunity to connect their people to the overall company’s purpose and vision. This requires reinforcement and repetition every day, everywhere, and with everybody. Alignment from the company CEO through to the frontline operator requires strong leadership and communication systems. Leaders need to work across the value stream, not just in a particular department, and become “enterprise leaders” to drive better outcomes for the organization.
Leaders need to take time to understand each team member's purpose; why do they come to work each day? Using the different adaptive leader hats, such as “Inspire,” helps people connect their personal purpose and understand how they contribute to the overall organization's purpose.
However, we can put a lot of time and effort into developing ideal behaviors; but unless we also change our systems to drive these behaviors, we will always get the old behaviors that are driven by the existing systems. As the second Shingo Insight teaches us, Purpose and Systems Drive Behavior; so if we want to embed new behaviors, we have to ensure our systems are changed so that they drive the new behavior. We need to be clear on the purpose of the system, define the behaviors needed to deliver this purpose, and then choose some Key Behavioral Indicators that measure and help us to manage these behaviors. We then need to apply a Plan, Do, Check, and Adjust improvement cycle to each system.
To do this, leaders need to deliberately plan their time to focus on managing the culture. A useful exercise is to reflect on how much of your typical day is dedicated to proactively managing culture. In Shingo Prize recipient organizations, the response is often 70% plus. One key system to use is Look, Listen, and Learn (LLL). These LLL activities are a process of discovery – they require an open mind and curiosity throughout. They are never about validating preconceptions but rather discovering what is going on. Being an adaptive leader and applying the 5 Hats is key to developing your people and freeing up your time.
