Last month, our colleague in South Africa, Keith Coats, started a series of blog entries aimed at helping people become better leaders. He has labelled the series “how to be future fit” and is providing daily, practical tools and exercises that will help you shift towards being an adaptive leader, ready for success in turbulent times.
If you missed the start of the series, don’t worry: you can begin any time. It is designed to give you 5 to 10 minutes of reflection, some activities and a little work in order to help you develop your leadership skills. You can start now by going back to the first leadership skill and working through all the entries thus far. We recommend you pace yourself and do no more than one per day.
Use this end of year season wisely to take a step up in your leadership ability. The list of entries thus far can be found below (we will keep it updated, so this is a good index for you).
As Keith explains, when it comes to leading into the future we need both mind-shifts as well as a new tool-kit if that is, we are to successfully navigate this new terrain. Adaptive leadership involves both head (mind-shift) and hands (practical skills) – the theory and practice engage in a symbiotic and synchronistic dance. It promises to be an eventful journey and the only comfort we can take from the journey past, is the fitness gained through having come this far. The old maps that have guided us to this point will prove unhelpful for what lies ahead. We will need to decide what to keep, what to discard and what to reorganize from the road traveled; we need to head into the future knowing that it is unlike anything we have encountered to date and it is this reality that makes it both a challenge and an opportunity.
We want to help you with this process through something of a ‘boot camp’ for adaptive leadership delivered in small, digestible bites that could help ensure that you move from being a good leader to an adaptive leader. So ‘sign-up’ and follow the thoughts and suggestions that are designed to help you become a future-fit leader – an adaptive leader. You might want to enlist others in your team and office and thereby enjoy the benefits of doing this 30-day ‘boot camp’ together.
So, stay tuned to the TomorrowToday app or blog and grow your leadership practice by becoming an adaptive leader.
Here’s the index of leadership development practices:
- Future Fit # 1: On becoming an adaptive leader
- Future Fit # 2: What really matters – to you?
- Future Fit # 3: Change: The constant context for adaptive leadership
- Future Fit # 4: Knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do
- Future Fit # 5: Creating a paradigm shift
- Future Fit # 6: Cultivating the art of great questions
- Future Fit # 7: What are you reading?
- Future Fit # 8: The need to experiment
- Future Fit # 9: Making sense of ‘normal’
- Future Fit # 10: Knowing the difference
- Future Fit # 11: Story & Culture
- Future Fit # 12: It takes the time it takes
- Future Fit # 13: The greatest fear
- Future Fit # 14: Right listening
- Future Fit # 15: Values, values, values.
- Future Fit # 16: Mind the gap
- Future Fit # 17: The paradox dilemma
- Future Fit # 18: Meetings!