When you hold one view, it’s always going to be less useful than many. These ‘Leadership Wisdoms’ words will explain a little of why this is imporant and what you can do to take a wider view than focus on the narrow.
We live in a world encouraging diversity, in its many forms. One of the most obvious and as challenging is how to create teams which have a full range of styles, attitudes and behaviours.
For leaders, having a team of people who are very similar, both to themselves as well as the leader is not the most effective way to go. Having a wide range of views to contradict, argue as well as complement each other with adds huge value to any team.
The leader must drive this. Whilst it might seem more comfortable to be with like-minded people, this can make blind-spots and weaknesses more prevalent. A leader needs the perception to appreciate when the team is becoming too aligned; too similar and take positive steps to change this.
But what does wider mean? Well, by bringing in people to a team who are different to the status quo, as people leave, providing recruitment opportunities is one way. But without that, by artificially forcing different viewpoints in the way a team acts, a leader can bring this change about quickly and effectively without any loss of personnel until the opportunity presents itself.
The leader’s role in being aware of what’s missing helps them appreciate the narrow-minded viewpoint they are living within, and once perceived will allow the leader to take and encourage a different stance.
For him or her, this might be a challenging experience, yet the alternative is to have a poor width on how the team performs, ultimately to the detriment of everyone.
To download the poster, backed by the article and 5 Steps to Going Wide, click here.