To create a bold leadership culture from top to bottom, you need passion, a deep commitment to learn and grow, empathy and dialogue. We must constantly be working to re-evaluate ourselves, our relationships with others, our purpose and our impact if we are to be successful.
Here are four key areas to focus on, which can help anyone to develop their own effective leadership style and to inspire bold leadership culture in their organisations.
SELF: Developing Conscious Identity
Bold leadership culture starts with being kind to yourself, recognising your true self in your work, and engaging your entire purpose in what you bring as a leader. But there is no leadership without learning.
To truly understand our strengths and limitations as leaders, we need to develop our conscious identity, and this requires constant learning. If we can commit to this evolutionary framework, we can learn to expand our ability to take risks, and perform at the top of our game.
When faced with challenges or in critical transition moments, we need to ask ourselves important questions: What are the beliefs that drive our behaviours? What can I live without and what are the habits that are getting in the way of being my best self? Who am I being whilst I’m on that path? When we reflect and find different perspectives and question how we can be better, we can develop more self-awareness, understand the impact we have in our communities and un-tap our potential to create bold leadership culture. This self-awareness will allow us to lead by example to delegate, motivate, inspire, and confront the challenges we face head-on.
But we cannot do it alone!
OTHER: Creating Relationship Agility
Building a culture of bold leadership depends heavily on flexing our trust muscles and empowering others to be their best, reflective, learning selves as well. Creating relationship agility means co-creating with other people, learning how to show our humanness, being approachable and practising authenticity in our relationships.
This does not happen in isolation. We work with other people every day and these people are all different and bring different things to the equation. They have different ideas, approaches, weaknesses and strengths, and bold leadership culture means navigating these and using them to optimise results. We must be ready to find different ways of doing things together, as a team, and should avoid imposing our way exclusively.
We can’t know everything, be everywhere or do everything on our own, so bold leadership culture also means trusting that other people’s greatness is part of the equation and having the ability to let go of some of the control to work together.
This letting go requires trust, vulnerability, and intimacy. If we surround ourselves with trusted people who can call each other fourth, we can grow through our relationships, and success becomes unequivocally tied to other people, our interactions and collaborations.
UNIVERSE: Unlocking Collective Intelligence
Bold leadership culture involves learning how to listen to basic patterns of thought and behaviour within the workplace and noticing what the organisation needs and how to contribute to those needs.
If we listen to work culture, the environment, what’s happening in the organisation, and the patterns that are informing us we can better understand what’s needed in the hive. Unlocking this collective intelligence is also about speaking up, noticing what is needed and delivering, to honour shared consciousness and the role it has in informing decision-making.
We also need to be aware of our impact in a wider, global sense. How are we a part of the world around us? What is our contribution? How are we shaping culture? How are we building the future? What is the bigger picture?
Bold leadership culture means recognising everything that concerns us and everything that shapes the world. If we can think more universally and be actively part of a whole, our engagement will become less about self-preservation and so less self-defensive. Instead, we can become empowered and proactive with a greater sense of shared purpose, accountability, and positivity for the world.
LEGACY: Demonstrating Purposeful Achievement
A bold leadership culture requires us to think about our legacy and the impact we want to create.
If we create a platform for meaningful, value-based work and entrepreneurial passion rather than just simply executing tasks, a culture of bold leadership can be established. Values of intimacy, compassion, and getting to know our teams enough to understand individuals’ values and potentials, are essential foundations in the building of a bold leadership culture.
Leadership models that appreciate these individual values and strengths in the workplace will allow for more meaningful work and enable teams to be engaged and motivated to contribute.
If we are to leave the legacy we wish for, we have to act in the present and be aware that everything matters. How are we honouring our purpose right now? Am I fulfilling my purpose in life? Am I in the right place to do that? What difference can I make in the world? What is the best impact I can make? What will my legacy be? Am I working from a place of self-preservation or a place of growth, togetherness and optimism?
If we can stand up, and take risks based on our values and purpose, we can dare to swim upstream and create cultures of bold leadership, which will make the world and our organisations better places.
Zana Goic Petricevic is an internationally certified leadership coach and consultant. She is the founder of Bold Leadership Culture, and the author of Bold Reinvented: Next level leading with Courage, Consciousness and Conviction.
