In coaching teams and individuals, one of the things I say ALL the time is that “Everything starts with a Vision”. It doesn't matter if its a personal vision, a business vision or a product vision. You have to put a stake in the ground and call it! Where are you going, does it inspire you, is it a big enough why to keep you focused and driving forward?
We often talk about visions in the context of leadership and product management, but visions really start at a more personal level. Setting a clear personal life vision is about identifying purpose, values, and long-term outcomes. It is about living a life in alignment with that vision, that includes your words and actions. It is about setting a direction and declaring “this not that” and then clarifying the actions you need to take in line with realizing that vision. A personal life vision mirrors the creation of a product or team vision, with both requiring deep clarity, strategic choices and intention. The difference being that product visions require healthy debate with a team to build alignment and buyin. A personal vision doesn't require debate, but it does require choosing!
What Is a Personal Life Vision?
A personal life vision is a clear picture of the life you want to create, encompassing your values, purpose, and long-term aspirations. It acts as a guiding light for the decisions you make and the paths you take. It helps you to stay focused, especially when life gets choppy. Creating one isn’t simply about achieving goals; it’s about aligning with what truly matters to you on a deeper, more conscious level. Fulfilling on your desires and who you want to be as a human being. It is not only about chasing the materialistic, but also about who you want to be as a conscious human being, about your spiritual philosophies and outcomes in areas such as career, finances, family, friends and social life; it is about the WHOLE human being. By doing so, you create a life that feels purposeful, fulfilled, and authentic. It is a creative process and if you live a life of high integrity, your words actually have power and you will be more likely to manifest your vision, than not.
Ways to Create a Life Vision
Now there are a hundred ways that you can go about creating a vision for yourself, you can write it in a document, you can collage images into a vision board, you can creatively write a story or song; whatever works for you. For me, I do my vision every two years as an online word document, with images included, in the areas of life I want to focus on for those two years. Coupled with this you could also lean into any of the below approaches; what's key is to find the approach that you love as you will be more likely to do it on a regular basis. The idea is to do it regularly, so it becomes a habit in your life. With a vision in place, YOU get to say how your life goes, rather than being buffeted by the winds of change in life.
Visualization and Manifestation: This involves mentally projecting yourself into the future. Close your eyes and imagine the life you want. What does it look like? How does it feel? Visualization can be paired with manifestation practices, where you believe and behave as though your vision is already happening. I actually do this everyday, so I can connect to my vision with images and emotions. The more you can visualise it, the more chance you have of fulfilling it. So work at increasing the color, the sound, the smells, bring it closer, be in the first person and stay connected to those images of the future.
Ikigai: Originating from Japan, *Ikigai* is a concept that translates to "reason for being." It combines your passion, mission, vocation, and profession into a life purpose. You ask yourself: What do I love? What am I good at? What does the world need? What can I be paid for? I will write a separate blog on this, so stay tuned.
Spiritual Purpose Exploration: Many seek their life vision through spiritual practices; whether through meditation, prayer, or mindful reflection. This process helps uncover your higher purpose or calling, connecting with something greater than yourself. A popular way is mindfulness, by taking your mind and focusing it on things like breathing and walking, it allows you to reduce stress and connect to the creative part of the brain; where you are more likely to find your purpose.
Relating Life Vision to Product Vision
Just as we craft a life vision for ourselves, product managers and leaders are tasked with leading a team in creating a vision. Gone are the days where you sat alone in a room and wrote it up yourself, then told others what it was and what they will be doing. A vision provides a guiding north star for the teams, or the product's future, defining the purpose and the outcomes that will drive its evolution and deliver on the organizations vision. I have worked with a lot of teams on identifying their product or team's vision and it is always fascinating to me at how "unaligned" the team is at the beginning and then how, walking them through the exercises, they become super aligned, which drives buy in and increases motivation. Doing it TOGETHER brings alignment AND buyin, it is not the leaders vision, it becomes OUR vision. So so critical to debate the vision and the leader or product manager becomes the facilitator of the debate, rather than the sole writer and together you shape the vision!
What Is a Product Vision?
A product vision is a forward-looking statement that describes what the product aims to achieve in the long term. It is aspirational and focuses on the value the product will deliver to their users or the market/s. Unlike a business vision, which may address broad company goals like market dominance or financial growth, a product vision zeroes in on the purpose and impact of a specific product. It then helps to structure and focus conversations & debate around which strategic goal to focus on.
Key Differences Between a Product Vision and a Business Vision
Business Visions and product visions differ in a few critical ways and how you write up your product vision is not the same as would for your business vision. Below are three elements where they differ:
- Scope: A product vision is narrower, focused solely on the product and the experience it delivers to users. A business vision covers the entire organization and its overall strategic goals.
- Audience: A business vision may be aimed at investors, employees, and stakeholders, while a product vision is geared towards users and customers, offering value and solving problems specific to them.
- Time Horizon: Business visions can span decades, while product visions often look towards a few years of strategic direction, allowing for agility and adaptation to market needs.
Identifying and Creating a Product Vision
When identifying a product vision, the process mirrors the creation of a personal life vision in many ways. Here's how to get started:
Clarify Purpose
Just as you would define your life’s purpose, defining the product's purpose is critical. What is key here is debating with the team and yes, essentially you will be wordsmithing and debating over each singular word until you get alignment. From this will come your vision and I love Geoffrey Moore's Vision Statement structure for product visions. In answering the below with the team, you can work on writing out a vision statement from the answers:
- What problem is this product solving?
- What impact or benefits will this product have on its users and the market?
- How does it align with the company’s core mission?
- What differentiates this product from other similar products?
Focus on Outcomes
Your product vision should help you with your strategic goals and to identify the long-term outcomes you aim to achieve for your users, or customers, that will help you move the dial on product outcomes and deliver on business outcomes. Think in terms of how your product changes lives or solves problems at a deeper level, just like a life vision looks to achieve fulfillment and purpose.
Create a User-Centered Vision
As with life visioning, where you think about how your purpose aligns with the needs of the world, product visions should be centered around the users. Identify who they are and empathize with their pain points, desires, and aspirations that go into your opportunity map.
Communicate the Vision
A product vision, like a life vision, needs to be shared and communicated effectively. In life, you might share your vision with mentors, friends, or a community. In product management, or an organisation, your vision should be communicated clearly to the team, in fact debated with them; then shared with stakeholders, leaders and possibly even customers. Take the time to gather feedback and more data, as your vision might need some tweaking.
Be Open to Change
Just as life changes and our personal vision evolves, so too must a product vision adapt over time. Market conditions, customer feedback, and technological advancements may require refining the vision as you go.
In Summary
Whether you're crafting a life vision or a product vision, the core principles remain remarkably similar. Both require deep clarity of purpose, a focus on long-term outcomes, and flexibility to adapt as conditions change. When you take the time to thoughtfully create these visions—whether for your life or your product—you set the stage for intentional, impactful outcomes that resonate deeply with those they touch.
Like the life vision that manifests your ideal future, a product vision aligns the team around a shared, aspirational purpose, driving towards a better tomorrow for your users and your product. So as you work on crafting your next product vision, take a moment to reflect: What is the vision you hold for your life? How can the clarity of that vision inform the products you build and the value you bring?
Culture is often defined as the shared attitudes, values, and behaviours of a team or organisation.
However, culture is more than just an abstract set of ideals. In companies like Netflix, it manifests as ongoing conversations, particularly among leaders, who hold each other and their teams accountable to the organisation’s principles and values. These values shape expected behaviours, creating a framework where feedback is regularly provided to align actions with the organisation’s cultural norms. In essence, culture shows up in daily interactions and reinforces a collective understanding: “This is how we do things here.”
Every team has its own culture, but this is inevitably influenced by the broader organisational culture—if one exists. A weak organisational culture results in team cultures that take precedence and that vary significantly across the company, leading to inconsistencies in performance, creativity, and innovation. Without a strong, unified organisational culture, teams will default to their own, which may be reactive and misaligned with the organisation's goals and performance will either be there, or it will not.
In contrast, organisations with strong, intentional cultures, like Netflix, are able to foster high performance, motivation, and innovation across teams. These cultures provide clarity on how decisions are made, who gets hired, and what behaviours are rewarded. In such environments, nothing is left to chance, and employees are aligned in pursuit of common goals.
Unfortunately, many leaders view culture as HR’s responsibility, believing that it ends with onboarding. After employees are introduced to the company's values, these values are often forgotten, rarely discussed or reinforced. This neglect can have serious consequences, from reduced creativity to lower employee engagement and a lack of adaptability to change.
Despite acknowledging the importance of culture, many leaders struggle to manage it effectively. Culture doesn’t just emerge naturally over time. While team cultures may evolve, organisational culture must be actively defined, taught, and reinforced. It is a living entity that evolves alongside the organisation, requiring continuous iteration and feedback. Leaders play a crucial role in transmitting and sustaining this culture, ensuring that it aligns with the company’s mission and strategy.
Why Culture Matters
Strong organisational cultures drive innovation, foster collaboration, and improve overall performance. They also shape how decisions are made, risks are taken, and strategies are developed. Intentional culture-building is one of the most powerful tools leaders have, whether they are guiding entire organisations, product teams, or individual contributors.
Leaders who take ownership of culture can influence everything from decision-making to employee satisfaction. However, defining and reinforcing culture requires intentional effort. Here’s how leaders can help shape a strong organisational culture:
Defining Culture Pillars: Principles, Values, and Behaviours
Identifying and Reinforcing Culture
Building a strong culture starts with defining your organisation’s values and principles but here are other things you can also do.
Once defined, culture should be continuously reinforced:
- Onboarding and Orientation: Culture starts from day one. New hires should be introduced to the organisation’s principles, values, and expected behaviours. Feedback from new employees can help refine these cultural elements over time.
- Leadership Behaviour: Leaders set the tone for the rest of the organisation. They must consistently role model the culture and reinforce it in daily conversations and feedback.
- Communication: How information is shared within the organisation reflects its culture. Is communication open and transparent, or hierarchical and closed?
- Recognition and Rewards: How employees are recognised and rewarded signals which behaviours are valued and encouraged within the organisation.
- Peer Interactions: Colleagues influence each other’s understanding of the culture through conversations, feedback and documents.
- Communities of Practice (CoPs): CoPs offer a platform for knowledge-sharing and help employees engage with the organisation’s culture through its practices.
The Leader’s Role in Culture
Leaders have a unique responsibility in shaping and sustaining culture. They should actively role model the organisation’s values and keep conversations about culture alive. Culture shouldn’t be treated as a static document—it’s a living framework that should evolve with the organisation. Leaders can reinforce culture by discussing principles and values regularly and aligning feedback with cultural expectations.
Culture drives innovation, collaboration, and performance. When embedded effectively, it also becomes a lever for strategic decision-making. By focusing intentionally on culture, leaders can influence not only their teams but also the long-term success of their organisations.
Conclusion
A well-defined and effectively implemented culture is essential for any organisation's success. By articulating clear principles, values, and behaviours, and consistently reinforcing these elements, leaders can create an environment that fosters innovation, collaboration, and high performance. As the Netflix example shows, culture is not just an HR function—it’s a leadership responsibility. By making culture a living, breathing part of the organisation, leaders can shape the future of their teams and their business.
Something scarce often has high worth, and this is certainly true for good leaders. While this applies to other roles such as product managers, engineers, and designers, it's especially important when it comes to leaders because of the significant impact they have on those around them.
Why Are Good Leaders So Important in Product Organizations?
Product management is more about people than technology. It’s essential to recognise the human element at work, which directly impacts performance. You can read more about this in my article on the inner life we all bring to the workplace. Conway’s Law states: "The structure of a system is determined by the communication patterns of the people who design it." — Melvin E. Conway. The stronger the communication and culture within the organisation, the better the final product will be. People will feel engaged and motivated. In short: Good leaders create great cultures, while bad leaders breed toxic ones.
Bad Leadership is The Biggest Reason People Leave
You can have amazing talent within your company, but if they're under poor leadership, they’ll soon start looking elsewhere. Losing a skilled employee not only means losing their talents but also the domain knowledge they've acquired. The cost of replacing an employee can range from half to twice their annual salary. Additionally, it takes, on average, two years for a new hire to fully understand the ecosystem and operate at peak performance. Hiring new talent is significantly more expensive than retaining good employees. So, what can you do? Hire the right leaders, train them, support them, given them clear responsibilities and appreciate them.
Google's Research into Good leaders & Great Teams
In 2008, Google thought they didn’t need middle leaders and laid off a significant number. Chaos ensued. As a result, they launched Project Oxygen, aiming to identify what makes a great leader. Through employee surveys and performance evaluations, they identified eight behaviours common to high-performing leaders. If you're wondering why these behaviours are critical, consider how incorporating them into management training can improve turnover, satisfaction, and productivity. In 2018, Google expanded the list of key behaviours by adding two more and updating others.
Shortly after, in 2016, they launched Project Aristotle to explore what makes a team effective. The key takeaway was that team effectiveness is less about who is on the team and more about how the team operates together, focusing on five pillars of effectiveness. The first and most important pillar is psychological safety, defined by Google as: “If I make a mistake on our team, it is not held against me.” Psychological safety enables employees to feel safe in taking risks and being themselves at work.
Good Leaders Exemplify Psychological Safety
If you’ve participated in my workshop on the Key Elements of Team Performance (loosely based on Five Dysfunctions of a Team), you’ll remember why it’s critical for leaders to cultivate psychological safety. There are two key elements:
- Vulnerability-based trust: Team members should feel safe to be authentic and share openly without fear of ridicule or minimisation.
- Operational-based trust: Teams should have explicit agreements about how they operate, their culture, and the behaviours they expect from each other.
How Do You Know You Have a Good Leader?
To me, the most critical quality is having a clear vision. Everything starts with vision; alignment, direction, and focus. Great leaders establish gravitas through their presence, communication, and role modelling, always moving towards the vision. When a leader carries this influence, others look up to and follow them, even without a title. Good leaders use their social capital to help those around them succeed.
They let their teams shine, knowing that real leadership isn’t about ego but about lifting others. They also know the difference between coaching, training, mentoring, and consulting, recognising that coaching is key to career development. They provide consistent feedback. Feedback is a gift; it helps employees address their blind spots and grow exponentially as a result. Good leaders give feedback because they care, not to tear others down.
They’re team players. Great leaders foster collaboration across the organisation, constantly building relationships, sharing context, and creating alignment. They actively encourage debate, knowing that diverse perspectives lead to better strategies and outcomes. They prioritise their team’s growth. By supporting career development and regularly discussing performance, they help individuals achieve their goals.
Good Leaders Don’t Blame
Instead, they work to improve processes and establish psychological safety. When mistakes happen, good leaders look at the bigger picture and often realise that poor decisions stem from missing context; typically due to a leadership gap.
They also have a growth mindset. Positivity is contagious, and a leader who embraces learning from failure will inspire others to do the same.
And lastly, don’t be arrogant. No one knows everything. The best leaders are humble, open to learning, and willing to admit when they don’t have all the answers.
If you have a great leader, make sure to show them appreciation. Recognition goes a long way in making a difference.
A leader’s Job Isn’t Easy
Management comes with its ups and downs, and they’re often more significant than those in other roles like engineering or design. The reasons include:
- Juggling many tasks: stakeholder communication, planning, and technical understanding.
- Managing time and communication effectively.
- Being judged by team results, not individual contributions.
- Giving feedback, navigating tricky situations, and managing conflicts.
- Being available to the team.
- Managing more interactions, including meetings and written communication.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but with time, resilience grows, and relationships make the challenges more manageable.
Two Things Are Clear
- A leader’s job has a huge impact.
- It’s also very difficult to do well.
Because of this, it's rare to find great leaders. But when you do, be sure to appreciate them; they make everyone around them better. If you have a good leader, take a moment next week to acknowledge their great work. It will truly make their day! Remember: Great culture is the foundation of a high-performing organisation, and it all starts with having good leaders who inspire it.
What is Strategic Thinking?
Strategic thinking is all about being intentional and methodical analysis of the factors that could influence the long-term success of a business, team, or individual. It’s about looking ahead, anticipating challenges, and identifying opportunities that could give you an edge. Strategic thinking means considering risks, threats, and new possibilities. Ultimately, it leads to setting clear goals, formulating plans, and coming up with ideas that allow you to thrive in a competitive and ever-changing landscape. You must also factor in economic conditions, market trends, industry trends, tech trends and the resources you have on hand. To think strategically, you'll need a mix of skills; research, analysis, innovation, problem-solving, communication, and leadership, along with the ability to make decisive calls.
Why is Strategic Thinking Important?
In today’s fast-paced business world, the competitive landscape can shift in the blink of an eye. New trends may pop up unexpectedly, and if you don’t act on them, you risk falling behind. By incorporating strategic thinking into your daily routines, you'll sharpen your ability to anticipate, forecast, and seize opportunities. On a personal level, being a strategic thinker means you can contribute more in your role, making you indispensable to your organization. It’s also a great way to show that you're ready to take on bigger responsibilities.
What Does Strategic Thinking Look Like in Business?
In many organizations, strategic thinking comes into play during the strategic planning process. Leaders analyze internal and external data to form the company's strategic direction, or the products strategic direction. This strategy document guides the organization for the foreseeable future, helping leaders prioritize actions that will drive the company forward and helping product people to align the product vision & strategy to deliver on the company's strategic direction. Strategic thinking shouldn’t be limited to once-a-year meetings, though. It's essential to revisit and review your strategic initiatives throughout the year to ensure they're being executed and continuously add value. For business leaders, strategic thinking is crucial for deciding what products to offer, which markets to compete in, which customer segments to target, where to invest and how to allocate resources like time, staff, and capital. Leaders also need to enroll others in the strategic debate and in achieving key objectives and protecting resources from unnecessary risks.
Strategic Thinking in Product
The best strategic thinkers understand the future outcomes that they're working towards and they make decisions that have the highest likelihood of achieving those outcomes. They predict the future, based on what they know today; then they work to realise that future.
Good decisions create valuable outcomes in the future, and bad decisions lead to unnecessary risk. So, we can think of decisions as the basic building block of strategy. This is why strategic thinking is so important for product work. We're always making decisions; some short-term like “What should this button say?” and others that can have impact for months or years to come such as “What should we prioritize?”, and “What is important to focus on right now for our product?”. We can make those decisions tactically by thinking only about the immediate moment, or we can think about each decision strategically; a step towards unlocking a valuable sequence of future options, outcomes, and opportunities, in line with a vision.
Strategic thinking helps us make good decisions. But what exactly is a good decision? A good decision comes from having context and it is not necessarily a “right” decision, that is, a decision that has a successful outcome. We’re predicting the future, and we can’t ever know for certain whether we’ll be right, but if you do the work to gather as much context as possible; company strategy, product opportunities, industry trends, market trends, economic trends, etc, then you will be able to make the best decision, given those rich insights. Every decision involves risk and sometimes more risk means more opportunity for upside. So a good decision is one that strikes the right balance of risk and reward, inside of good context. Balancing agility with decisiveness is critical. Strategic thinkers need to commit to a plan while remaining open to new, promising opportunities. It’s all about staying adaptable while maintaining focus.
Again, I can't stress enough how important it is to get into a strategic debate with your team; strategy doesn't happen in a monologue and alone, it happens in a debate, where other perspectives are shared and debated about. Only then can you identify a great strategy.
How to Improve Strategic Thinking Skills
Key Components of Strategic Thinking
When developing your company’s strategy, you’ll need to focus on several key areas:
- Analyzing business & product opportunities and risks.
- Evaluating the feasibility and cost of potential actions.
- Prioritizing goals and aligning them with the overall strategy.
- Anticipating competitors' actions and other external factors that could impact your plans.
- Reviewing industry, community and technology trends
How to Teach Strategic Thinking
One of the most effective ways to learn strategic thinking is by attending workshops led by experienced facilitators. A good workshop will provide hands-on opportunities to apply strategic thinking to real-world challenges and offer feedback on your strategic plan.
An effective strategic thinking workshop should include:
- Some learning on modern strategies and what strategy is and isn't.
- Group discussions on best practices and tools.
- Learning labs or simulations that allow you to practice strategic thinking immediately.
- Feedback and assessments of your current strategic thinking abilities.
- Guidance in developing a personalized plan to take back to work
As with any skill, you’ll improve at strategic thinking the more you practice it and the more experience you gain. It’s definitely worth the time and effort!
When you're an individual contributor, your ability to use your technical expertise to deliver results is paramount!
However, once you advance into a leadership role, the toolkit that enabled you to succeed as an individual rarely equips you to succeed as a leader. Beware of falling into the logical trap of, "If I can do this work well, I should be able to lead a team of people doing this work." This might seem true if leading others was like operating a more powerful version of the machinery you once handled, but it’s not. Machines don't perform better or worse based on what they think of you or how you make them feel; humans do! As a leader, you have to lean into coaching others and getting to know them as fellow human beings!
Inner Life
According to Amabile & Kramer, (Teresa M. Amabile & Steven J. Kramer, “Inner Work Life,” HBR, 2007) there is an "inner work life" that managers must consider. Most leaders are out of touch with this concept and don't realise how profoundly inner work life can affect performance.
Every individual’s performance is influenced by their perceptions, motivations, and emotions triggered by daily work events. Their perceptions; how they make sense of their work, includes the meaning, purpose, and value it brings to them, as well as the day-to-day tasks they must perform. It also includes their view of themselves: their role on the team, the project they’re on, their capabilities, confidence, value, and place in the organisation. In addition, their self-confidence is affected by limiting beliefs they hold about themselves, others and what's possible in life. In fact, I would argue that limiting beliefs are the key driver behind performance. If these beliefs are numerous and self-worth is low, performance will likely suffer. Conversely, if individuals confront and recognise their limiting beliefs, they are more likely to perform at a higher level.
Secondly, motivation; what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and whether to do it, is deeply affected by these limiting beliefs. If you believe you can’t succeed, you're less likely to be motivated to try. Lastly, emotions; reactions to everyday work events, play a crucial role, along with how you reflect on and manage them. This includes happiness, pride, warmth, love, sadness, anger, frustration, and fear. Are individuals emotionally regulated? Do they get easily triggered? Do they reflect, learn, and adapt, or remain rigid in their responses? Do they know what their limiting beliefs are and their triggers? Do they have mechanisms that help them manage their emotions? An individual's perceptions influence their emotions and motivations, which in turn shapes their performance. It may stun you, if you are a manager, to learn what power you hold to affect, support and impact others. Your behaviour as a manager dramatically shapes your employees’ inner work lives and hence their performance.
Leading vs. Managing
Occupying a leadership position is not the same as truly leading. To lead effectively, you must connect with others, inspire motivation, and foster a sense of ownership over shared objectives. Developing this ability requires deep self-awareness, recognising how your thoughts, actions, and behaviours affect others. True leadership demands continuous personal development. However, many people in leadership roles avoid this challenging work in favour of focus on the day to day tasks so their leadership is purely transactional; or quick-fix management tools like performance management systems for focus and growth. These tools can't replace genuine collaboration, dialogue and reflection on both their own and their employees' experiences. This mechanistic approach distracts leaders from the crucial link between their behaviour, their team's inner work life, theirs and their employee outcomes.
Tools cannot replace fearless introspection
Identifying your limiting beliefs, regulating emotions, seeking and giving feedback, growing as a human being and making a genuine effort to change behaviour is the key to greater effectiveness as a leader and a positive impact on others. The results you achieve in life are directly linked to who you are being. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship. The real issue is awareness: awareness of yourself (including your shadow self and limiting beliefs), awareness of what makes a great leader and what makes your employees great. Self-awareness grows as you enhance your emotional intelligence, build emotional vocabulary, improving self-regulation, identify and deal with limiting beliefs and becoming more reflective. By being more aware, you become more conscious of your words and actions and the impact they have. Your team is always watching, listening, and analysing your behaviour. Leaders must understand that their greatest leverage to boost commitment and accountability lies not in tracking goals but in creating a motivating, psychologically safe environment through coaching. This requires getting to know each team member personally, understanding their beliefs, thoughts, emotions, motivations and perceptions and limiting beliefs.
Leadership Mindset
Great leaders recognise how their assumptions and interpretations shape their behaviour. They learn to consciously adopt mindsets and behaviours that produce better outcomes. As humans, we don’t react to reality itself but to our thoughts, interpretations, and assumptions about reality. All of these fall within the domain of inner work life. Distinguishing this is powerful as you realise that YOU have the power to choose an interpretation, perception that is more empowering and if you are a leader, you have the power to coach your team, to choose more empowering interpretations. You have the power to always choose a more empowering context for your life, your work, your team, which will change the motivation and inner lives of the team. Instead of waiting for a magical tool to manage your team, focus on developing practices, such as coaching, that increases your leadership proficiency. This means taking every leadership opportunity and translating it into repeatable behaviours that drive desired results. It also means confronting your shadow self, identifying limiting beliefs about yourself and others, and actively working through them.
Manager vs Leader
Let’s take the time to differentiate between a leader and a manager. According to John Kotter (“What Leaders Really Do,” HBR 2002), the term "leader" emphasises the importance of the people aspect of the manager’s role. Managers focus on operational tasks and processes and are transactions; whereas leaders inspire people to achieve peak performance and optimum business outcomes while supporting their well-being at work. These are known as transformational leaders. They do it by coaching the individual. As organisations move toward a coaching culture, the term "manager" is being replaced by "leader," and coaching is becoming a common leadership style. If you're not coaching, connecting with, and investing in your people, you’re managing; not leading.
To further distinguish between transformational leaders and those who are transactional we need to understand the difference in behaviours that help us aim for excellence in leadership and apply them. So let’s compare great leaders who deliver versus leaders who disrupt, so that we can understand what behaviours we are aiming for in our daily leadership behaviours.
Leadership Aspect | Transformational Leaders | Transactional Leaders |
Vision & Strategic Direction | - Have a clear vision, identifying strategic goals and setting a direction. - Continually communicate context and connect with others to share information for better decision-making. | - Lack vision, failing to provide direction or motivation. - Poor communication, withholding information or misleading others to maintain control, causing confusion and mistrust. |
Use of Power | - Use power mindfully, influencing through relationships, context, and resources. | - Use power thoughtlessly, relying on authority and expertise to control rather than lead. |
Motivation & Empowerment | - Create conditions for motivation to flourish by empowering others. | - Use pressure, fear, and hierarchy to motivate, diminishing others' contributions. |
Performance Focus | - Are obsessed with performance and results, balancing short-term goals with long-term success factors. | - Are myopically focused on results, ignoring underlying factors that drive sustainable performance. |
Accountability & Behaviour | - Stamp out poor behaviour and foster allyship, regardless of results. - Take 100% responsibility for outcomes and drive change. | - Tolerate poor behaviour as long as results are delivered. - Avoid responsibility and shift blame when things go wrong. |
Feedback & Recognition | - Regularly review both wins and lessons learned with discipline, providing constructive feedback and recognition. | - Move on from wins quickly and focus solely on failures, neglecting feedback and recognition. |
Goal Setting | - Adjust goals flexibly to keep motivation high. | - Only adjust goals to make them harder, regardless of team morale or circumstances. |
Decision-Making | - Make consistent, transparent decisions using clear frameworks. - Empower all roles to make decisions with shared context. | - Are inconsistent in decision-making, frequently changing direction and causing instability. - Withhold power and make decisions unilaterally, limiting autonomy. |
Leadership Style | - Exhibit transformational leadership, serving and empowering others by coaching, while aligning with business goals. - Build strong relationships and align words, actions, and values with integrity. | - Demonstrate transactional, ego-driven leadership focused on personal gain. - Lack integrity, undermining trust and creating a toxic environment. |
Emotional Intelligence | - Exhibit high emotional intelligence (EQ), showing empathy and understanding. | - Lack emotional intelligence, leading to insensitivity, disengagement, and low morale. |
Conflict Management | - Understand conflict modes, actively encouraging debate and diverse opinions to reach the best solutions. | - Avoid or mishandle conflicts, using power to suppress differing viewpoints. |
Adaptability & Change Management | - Are open to change and innovation, understanding change management models and when to apply them. | - Resist change, being inflexible and failing to adapt to new circumstances or feedback. |
Team Building | - Take team-building seriously, hiring diverse candidates and fostering team culture through clear agreements and feedback. | - Neglect team-building, hiring "cookie-cutter" employees and fostering a divisive, competitive environment. |
Performance Management | - Are deeply involved in performance management, using tools like the skills-will model to tailor coaching and management. | - Manage performance ineffectively, showing favouritism and inconsistent expectations. |
Growth Mindset & Innovation | - Have a growth mindset, welcoming new ideas and valuing diverse perspectives to foster creativity and innovation. | - Are closed-minded, resistant to new ideas, and dismissive of differing opinions, stifling innovation. |
Development of Others | - Focus on career development, connecting team members to learning and mentoring opportunities. - Utilises coaching for behavioural change | - Neglect the growth and development of team members, resulting in disengagement. - Tells people what to do, how to do it and when to do it. |
Self-Awareness & Reflection | - Are self-aware, reflecting on their actions and impact, and self-regulating to align with goals and relationships. | - Lack of self-awareness, leading to poor emotional management and ineffective leadership. |
Fairness & Inclusion | - Are conscious of bias and constantly work towards diversity and inclusion in hiring, team treatment, and salary equity. | - Show bias and favouritism, leading to unfair treatment, demotivation, and a toxic work environment. |
