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I’ve recently wrapped up a super-satisfying 12-month engagement with the leadership team of a critical function in their organisation. If you’re struggling with how to level up your leadership team’s ability to lead and continuously evolve, their story of transformation is worth knowing about.

Their function delivers critical advisory services where mistakes have serious consequences. Their reputation for technical excellence was well-deserved, but came at a cost: 

• The leaders’ focus on perfection meant they were personally across every aspect of projects, creating major bottlenecks. Some projects were taking lengthy times to complete - in one case over two years!
• And with senior leaders holding the pen, staff felt disempowered, reduced to data crunchers rather than valued contributors. 
• Meanwhile, given the slowness of delivery, some customers were increasingly finding alternative ways to get answers.

Their boss, frustrated with a lack of progress, engaged me to work with them as a catalyst and coach for change. We focused on defining and enabling three significant leadership shifts:

1. From perfectionist to experimentalist: Moving from getting everything right to trying things out and learning. ‘Learning over languishing’ became their mantra, with 80% right now being better than 100% much later.
   
   
2. From controller to empowerer: Their identity shifted from controlling outputs to enabling their team to make more decisions. This transformed how staff engaged with the work, and began to grow the capability of their brilliant talent even further.
   
   
3. From risk-aversion to value-creation: Rather than primarily focusing on avoiding mistakes, they began asking, "How do we add the most value here?" This possibility-focused approach energised everything.

As one leader put it, the team has developed a bias for "more purposeful action". They weren’t just being busy, but being way more deliberate and asking different questions. For example, the shift from "What might go wrong?" to "What might we learn?" has opened new horizons for new possibilities. 

Are they there yet? Nope. Have they built the skillsets and mindsets to accelerate their transformation? Absolutely.

This work wasn’t easy for them. In the early stage, they put up plenty of resistance. Many held tightly to their identity as ‘leader as expert’. With the right ingredients, a transformation slowly and surely took place.

From this journey, I reckon there are four ingredients needed for meaningful leadership transformation and change:

1. Change requires heat: Something needs to disrupt the status quo. In this case, both the boss’s frustration and market pressures provided steady heat.
   
   
2. Change requires support: Transformation ins’t a solo journey. These leaders were empowered and supported by their boss, along with tools and coaching from me.
   
   
3. Change requires experiments: You can't think your way into new behaviours. Action and reflection drive genuine development.
   
   
4. Change requires commitment to a bigger why: Connecting evolution to a higher purpose makes change sustainable. This stayed central to our work the entire way through.
   
   

What leadership shifts might you make to create more value and possibility for those you lead? What experiment could you try this week to move in that direction?

For more like this, check out:

Are You Transforming or Tinkering?

How to Know The Difference Between Change and Transition

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