What kind of decision maker are you?

Posted on by Martin Murphy

Being able to overcome our habitual decision making gives us a helicopter view. That’s important in complex and challenging times.

Chances are you’ll favour 1 or 2 of the following 4 styles:

REACTIONARY: You like to move to think, you tackle challenges head on. You make snap decisions based on your preferences & you like to be in command of the situation. (Autocratic)

RATIONAL: You prefer the tried & tested. Check-lists are important. Expertise and experience count & you like to be certain because you don’t like to be wrong. (Bureaucratic)

RELATIONAL: You like to make decisions based on the ecology of the situation i.e. How will it affect others? You like to be certain because you don’t want to upset people. (Communal)

REVOLUTIONARY: You enjoy challenging the status quo & playing devils advocate,. You’re exploratory in your approach & don’t like to cut off your options. (Democratic)

The Trouble With Values

Posted on by Martin Murphy

Values can be quite confusing, and more to the point they’re pretty useless unless you know how to action them in your decision making process.

What Traits Make a Good Leader

Posted on by Martin Murphy

Whilst being interviewed I was asked what traits make a good leader. It reminded of an exercise I do on the Mercenary to Missionary Leadership retreats.

THE FIVE SUPERPOWERS OF GREAT LEADERS

Posted on by Martin Murphy

Archimedes said, ‘give me a lever long enough and a strong place to stand, and I can move the world’. Well the lever is leadership and the place to stand is humility.

With humility the word leader transforms from a noun to a verb. Leading is something that ordinary people can do to leverage the potential within other people, themselves, a team or a situation. With simple rules of behaviours amongst a group of people comes synergy, where the whole becomes more effective than the sum of its parts.

The following leadership Superpowers are really simple, the challenge for most ‘so-called’ leaders today is having the humility and compassion to want to be great leaders because most are ego-centric as opposed to eco-centric. There are plenty of great leaders out there but unfortunately their results and efforts are overpowered by ego-centric power brokers who maintain the status -quo.

The world needs great leadership and effective teamwork at every level and every corner of the world right now, if we’re to tackle the enormous challenges which have come about by ego-centric leadership that has run rampant supported by delusional ideology and institutions which condones selfish behaviour.

The five leadership super powers:

Listen and clarify: This requires cognitive intelligence and it is a skill which requires the leader to engage in focussed listening, summarising and questioning to ascertain more of the details.

Recognise and reward: A lot of people complain that they’re not recognised at work and in some of their closest relationships. It is often why people may move on from one organisation in search of more rewarding pastures.

Nobody wants to be a widget in the machine, especially since the social contract which kept people subservient in the Victorian era, has been shredded. An effective leader utilises behavioural intelligence to recognises people’s efforts when they’re doing good work and rewards them for their efforts.

Enquire and empathise: This requires the use of compassion and emotional intelligence. With this you enquire how a person is or a team is and you try to intuit how they are feeling so that you can understand their situation more clearly. Often this will mean listening for what isn’t being said, understanding the whole person and what’s going on in their life outside of the organisation, so you can support them.

Challenge and champion: Leaders should be constantly looking for ways to improve the structure and challenge the status-quo. It requires the use of social intelligence to see how the team are operating, the lines of communication, the informal networks and also looking outside to learn new ideas that can be assimilated into the organisation, team or individual. It also involves creativity to come up with new modus-operandi, products and services and then champion those ideas so everybody gets to hear about them.

Knowing what to do and when: Lastly, the leader needs to exercise situational awareness. This includes being self-aware enough to understand their own skills and what they may need to practice more of, but also a leader needs to be able to determine when and which Leader Superpower to exercise to optimise the situation.

Making Decisions Effectively & Why Politics is Pointless

Posted on by Martin Murphy

See below the video for a PDF download with some notes to help you understand this material. Download the notes then listen to the video as this would probably be the best way to understand the content.

New to all this self videoing so b with me while I learn the skills! 🙂

 

PDF Making Effective Decisions

Leading in Challenging Times

Posted on by Martin Murphy
In the third in our series of weekly webinars, we spoke to special guest Martin Murphy, ex-special forces soldier and founder of Elite Leadership, on how to lead your team through a crisis.

Some of the top takeaways included:

1. Good leaders look after the people first
2. Don’t stare at the fire, look for opportunities
3. Top behaviours of effective leaders: emotional intelligence; learning agility; humility; courage
4. How they lead: engage with their teams; align them around common objectives and goals; evolve if things change; practice radically open communication
5. Leaders often cannot escape the storm so they must be able to create peace and tranquillity within the storm to allow them to think clearly and make great decisions. The SOAR model is a way to slow down the reactive thinking process and induce a creative interlude in which higher order thinking is possible:
a. Suspend snap decision making
b. Observe the problem
c. Allow wisdom to percolate up
d. then Respond quickly
6. Promote positive behaviours by adopting a HERO mindset. So be: Helpful; Effective; Resilient; and Optimistic.

There were many more top tips he had to share which can can watch in this video.

 

The Delusion of VU (From VUCA) is Over!

Posted on by Martin Murphy

I came across a discussion on twitter which alluded to the fact that the world was becoming more complex. This discussion was based on the ideas of General Stanley McChrystal, author of ‘Team of Teams, New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World’.

McChrystal wrote:

“Efficiency remains important, but the ability to adapt to complexity and continual change has become an imperative.”

I remember feeling irked about this statement and the reason for this response, (apart from having man-flu at the time) is that people are acting as if VUCA (the US military term to represent volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) is a new phenomenon. That’s not correct, the world has always been subject to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Ask poor people.

Read more: Here

Great Leaders are Learning to Paradigm Shift

Posted on by Martin Murphy

“The biggest paradigm shifts happening right now are ironically the increasing awareness of the existence of paradigms…”

Paradigms are a worldview shared amongst a group of people so they can experience group identity
and achieve a common purpose. Our world is governed by them very much like seas influence the
life of a fish.

Examples of paradigms include the idea of countries, money, religion.

They are a set of beliefs, values and stories which enable collaboration with greater numbers of people and even with people living different locations. It is our ability to use paradigms that enabled us  to climb to the top of the species hierarchy.

One monkey left on a deserted island might survive more ably than one person might (unless he’s Bear Grylls). But if you put one hundred people on the island, then they would organise themselves more effectively than the monkeys.
But there are a few problems with paradigms….  Read More

Imposter Syndrome~Why Bad Leaders Don’t Get it & How To Get Over It!

Posted on by Martin Murphy

I was recently invited by the crew at JCI Manchester to present a talk on Impostor Syndrome.

JCI is a global not-for-profit organisation run for members by members, which provides development opportunities for 18 – 40 year old professionals and leaders, to empower them to create positive change.

Whilst presenting my talk I pointed to a statistic which said that in a group of 3000 people aged 18-34, a whopping 86% experienced Impostor Syndrome in that year. As I had a room full of this age bracket, I used this as an opportunity to ask the room and sure enough, practically all the hands went up.

I thought I would follow this up with this article because as a leadership and team performance coach, I believe social anxiety problems like Impostor Syndrome are limiting talented people from making a positive impact.

Want to know more about Impostor Syndrome from a different perspective, read: Here

Leadership Coaching for The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Posted on by Martin Murphy

Anticipating and planning for a world which not even the experts know will look like yet, will bring fresh challenges – probably daily – for leaders, teams and the coaches who support them.

Here is a white paper on a new model of coaching suited to Modern Day Leadership Coaching. It’s aimed at leaders and coaches wanting to leverage more potential and unlock the opportunities within the chaos of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Download here.