In the last article we defined that New Leadership is a part of positive Leadership. If we want to implement New Work structures and cultures, we need to transform our leaders from traditional to New Leaders. This helps us to build-up a new work culture where the daily work of your employees becomes meaningful and progressive to achieve results. Let’s bring these aspects all together with the New work goal and the New Leadership skills into your daily work life.
Overview of the Change Journey
Becoming a New Work leader is a longer journey – and without having the right framework it is almost impossible to achieve your results. Hence, we strongly recommend building first your New Work framework, before you start to learn the New Work leadership skills. The framework is the following:
- At its core it starts with the values – if you work in a larger organization they might have been already explicitly communicated, then it is the most important to identify yourself with these values
- Secondly to set your purpose: Ideally this purpose is mapped to your organization’s purpose – if the company you work for has not a higher purpose it is even more important to develop a purpose for you and your team
- Thirdly to develop a vision: It is very important to have a vision for you and your team in place, ideally in alignment with your company’s vision. If your company does not have a clear vision, it is even more important to define one for your team.
- Fourthly to learn leadership skills explicitly – there are 22 important leadership skills (link to leadership page) – learn this skills explicitly and learn how to lead yourself, individuals and teams individually with positive psychology
- And last but not least to use OKRs to implement strategic goals with snackable OKRs on a quarterly basis. This helps everyone in your team to develop the required growth mindset
How do you set a New Work structure?
Step 1: Define your values
As a leader it is very important to have a set of values in place that are important to you to work with other people. Values shape the culture of your team.
Making your values explicit helps everyone from day one to adapt and adjust their style according to your values. Moreover, it also helps applicants to identify themselves with your organization / team or not.
In consulting projects we normally identify with individuals their values with the help of Martin Seligmen’s values in action and with some reflections what we highly appreciate working with and what is demotivating us.
On the basis of 4-5 defined values we develop a value definition that will be communicated to the entire team and what each value means for our work with colleagues or clients.
Step 2: Define your Purpose
A purpose means a higher meaning, why we do things and why we get up every morning. 150 years ago the purpose was highly influenced by religion and people took the religious purpose as their purpose for their lives.
Nowadays, we have neither a strong influence of religion, nor do many companies have a strong purpose – and we have also not learned to define our own purpose. Hence, it is even more important to give a purpose to your life, your role as a leader and your team.
There is a classic best seller book from Simon Sink that helps to find your why that helps individuals to find their personal why.
Step 3: Define your vision
It is very important to develop a personal leadership vision. Where shall your team be in 5 years? How will individuals work by then? What will people say about your team? What will people say about your leadership? With a guided reflection, it is possible for everyone to develop his / her own vision; even without being too futuristic.
Take your time and reflect for some moments how to develop your vision. In our vision and purpose module you will be guided to develop your own vision and purpose. See here.
Step 4: Learn Leadership Skills
As mentioned in articles before – we often adapt leadership skills from the people we have worked with. Most of the time those skills we liked most at them; barely we actually learn leadership skills in depth to become explicit when we work with other people. We invite young and experienced leaders to learn the most important 22 leadership skills to become a New and positive leader to (1) lead yourself, (2) lead individuals and (3) lead teams. Learn more about our leadership skills on our website.
Step 5: Achieve your goals
These steps will equip you to become strong in goal realization and result achievement. However, achieving goals also requires a strong growth mindset and the skill to break large goals into micro goals – the so-called objectives.
There is a larger terminology around Objectives and Key Results. After having implemented OKRs in many companies, it is very important for us to teach leaders and teams the ability to break a goal into objectives. This means steps to realize the outcome. So for instance: If you want to become the most inspiring brand regarding customer service, you may have several objectives, such as:
- To implement a new customer loyalty program
- To skill and educate the people in customer service
- To develop new processes and routines for customer complaints etc.
There are several objectives that need to be realized to reach your goal to become the brand with the most inspiring customer services.
During the course of the following weeks, we will introduce you more about how to transform yourself and your team towards a New Work Leader with positive psychology. So stay tuned 😉
You can watch our video on “How to set New Work Structures” below:
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See you next Sunday!
Your Amaze Growth Team
