Leadership is a role not a right. One of the key ideas which helped frame our 45 minute discussion that pulled together some of the big themes from this series of web seminars.
So how do you best live that role – and of course, what has changed with COVID?
We were lucky to be joined by two guests to help us explore this with our audience:
Matthew Hunt is the COO of the UK’s leading retail payments authority, pay.uk, having built his career in payments systems at the Bank of England
Amiel Kornel spent 25 years in Silicon Valley providing strategic services then leading a significant VC fund backing start up and scale up firms. He’s also now written a leadership book for changing times, ‘Spinning Into Control’
Our thinking: COVID has shown us that we’re lying when we pretend we can predict the future (as the Chair of Crossrail told us in our Infrastructure discussion) and so the pretence that we can control events is laid bare.
Our concept of risk changes when we realise this (see Richard Anderson‘s thinking on this in a previous discussion on ecosystems), and leadership becomes the ability to collaborate with others to tackle change and respond to unpredictability.
The mindset change we proposed was to release control and focus instead on interdependence, which leads to the need to build trust-based relationships of mutual value. That creates more ambitious outcomes.
We looked at how to do this. Amiel emphasised the need to incorporate improvisation in business; Matthew talked of focusing on outcomes not outputs and deserving your mandate through the value you continue to provide. Others also contributed their reflections on these ideas.
You can see the full discussion below.
At Mutual Value we work with organisations who want to be more ambitious about that they can achieve with their customers, suppliers and partners. This is based on a changed mindset, a new skillset and a toolset we have developed, and deliver through consultancy, training and coaching programmes.
If you would like to set up a call to discuss this please email sophie@mutual-value.com