The New Leadership Paradigm

The knowledge economy and the subsequent ‘human’ economy as some refer to it, has presented the business world with the need for a huge paradigm shift on a global scale. As organizational success increasingly depends on the ability of the collective working brain-power of workforces to create and produce, the goal must be to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual. As this dramatic paradigm shift from mechanistic-to-systemic continues to unfold, leadership too must evolve to think systemically, to attend to values, to take a holistic perspective, and to focus on strengths rather than on weaknesses.

Arising from the research being done in the neurosciences and quantum physics, this leadership evolution will require that we develop a new skill – the skill of Positive Presence. The skill of Positive Presence is the ability to create and adjust for a positive and energized mindset through conscious thought processes to result in effective behaviours necessary for obtaining optimum performance, creating strong and lasting relationships and experiencing good health. The idea of individual behaviour, group and team behaviour, and overall organizational behaviour has consequently taken on a new importance. Behaviour is the most tangible evidence of organizational culture that there is. It is also a key performance indicator for cognitive strength and mind health. And it is the tangible result of human emotional energy.

So, the once thought of soft skill of the workplace – behaviour – has now moved to a level of huge importance for today’s organizational success. So too, in many instances, highly successful people are protective of the behaviour (positive and negative) they believe is the source of their success. This protectiveness is supported by confirmation biases. Confirmation bias is a type of selective thinking or a tendency to gravitate towards facts and data that suggest what an individual already believes to be true.

Where you find safety, quality and service problems in the workplace, you will find a leader (or leaders) with inappropriate and negative behaviours. Many leaders do not see their negative behaviours as the root cause of the safety, quality and service problems they encounter in the workplace. Their confirmation bias is strong, and they are often ready to show evidence from the data that something else is the source of their performance challenges. One conclusion is absolutely true: Behaviour lapses are obvious to everyone but the person who commits them.

The understanding that a leader’s behaviour is the key predictor to organizational performance is a radical shift in leadership thinking. To develop a performance driven culture a key element is to begin to focus not on the technical elements and processes, but to begin to consider the impact that poor behaviour has on safety, quality and service. This shift must start with leaders at all levels.

Real change will never come from an annual conference or the latest management fad. It will come from within an organization whose leaders are committed to understanding the impact that being self-aware, collaborative and connected to their followers has on performance and the willingness to enhance their behaviour competencies to unleash performance. Real change will only come from influential leaders who are focused on the performance gap created by an imbalance between technical skills and behaviour skills.

People tend to change their behaviour when they understand how it affects (negatively and positively) the outcome of their work, the lives of those around them and the overall performance of their organization. For example, when a supervisor who is verbally aggressive to team members understands that this behaviour intimidates co-workers and compromises the team’s performance, they are more likely to change or tone down their approach. Another example is when the department director changes the “mental map” or “mental script” of weary managers by asking them to think of their job as necessitating that they be able to inspire, involve and reward individuals in unique and productive ways to build on the power of relationship, they too are more likely to pay closer attention to their work. Closing the performance gap in today’s knowledge-based organizations is a nonnegotiable imperative.

Years of emphasis on technical skills and technical solutions have provided some modicum of marginal improvement. The real key to performance excellence today and in the future is to focus on behavioural skill development for enhanced cognitive capacity — the skill of Positive Presence.