During my time working within some of the highest performing organizations in the world, I have watched exceptional leaders build hills, not mountains or cliffs, to create high performance cultures.
I call this “intuitive leadership” - and it’s a practice worth sharing.
If we think of each leader’s decision as a pebble, the accumulation of these decisions become rolling hills, large mountains, or sharp cliffs. These hills, mountains or cliffs are what employees climb as they work within the environments we create.
Employees navigate the hills, mountains, and cliffs each day to perform, grow and develop into leaders who will contribute their own pebbles in time. Most importantly, it is from us, they are learning how to build hills, mountains, or cliffs.
As leaders, we can create rolling hills that empower employees to explore, grow, develop, and perform with ample space, flexibility, guidance, and support. Alternatively, we can build mountains with rough terrain, limited guidance or aid, and little time for recovery, reflection or solutioning. In the worst-case scenario, we build sharp cliffs that generate fear and stifle creativity, innovation and collaboration because it’s simply about surviving the day.
My experience working within the toughest, most competitive environments, has proven that intuitive leaders build hills through:
Open & Real Conversations to Identify Barriers & Solutions
Shared Responsibility & Accountability
Trust, Respect & Fairness
When we build hills, we build cultures where employees can thrive and ensure we shape intuitive leaders for the future.
I guess there is a reason the Sound of Music was a favorite movie of mine!