Three Leadership Lessons That Future-Proof Your Management Layer

I spent 4 days in Melbourne with the Thought Leaders Business School on my first Immersion. The thinking time pulled me back to some leadership ideas I return to constantly in my work, and I wanted to share them.

The leaders I work with, whether in group programmes or one-to-one coaching, have usually reached the same conclusion: without sustained, deliberate effort, they will not get better. I think of good leadership as the difference between a firework and a glacier. Both involve movement and something worth watching. A glacier, though, outlasts the firework's few seconds and changes the landscape around it as it moves, picking things up and carrying them forward. That glacier-style shift in mindset and behaviour, applied over time, is what I focus on.

When Harry Potter was struggling to become the wizard he needed to be, Dumbledore would ask him questions, show him things from angles he had missed, and point out where his own approach was working against him without Harry even noticing. I encourage every leader to find their Dumbledore. These people are sometimes in your domain of expertise, though by no means always, and they add value either way. It is easy to feel you have tried everything you know. A coach or mentor helps you see what you have not seen and offers ideas on how to keep moving like that glacier.

Many leadership programmes load you up with models, ideas and theories, then send you back to your desk. I compare that approach to painting the outside of your house with water-based paint. It looks fine until the first rain, at which point the investment of time, effort and money has been wasted.

With my clients, I use leadership experiments: they try something, record what happened, and we work through the outcomes together. We talk through the challenges and barriers before they act, then focus on what to do and how to do it. I share content occasionally, but most people already know the content from a Google search. What they are sitting in is the knowing-doing gap. They know what to do but are unsure how to do it, or worried about what happens if it goes wrong, and they have nobody invested in their success to come back to afterwards.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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