Welcome to 🍏Lunch N Learn with Lindsay🍏 Issue 194. Last week I delivered the first in a new Series of Lunch n Learn LIVE Sessions entitled “Leadership Level up for EAs and PAs” (don’t worry if you missed this! You can purchase the recording here). With just an hour to share valuable learning, it was a bit of a challenge to prioritise the topics that would provide the most impact for you. There’s a vast amount of learning that contributes to successful leadership that I want to share with you – all absolutely relevant to the EA/PA role. For a 60 minute Session, I needed to be selective with what I shared so you could take away practical, actionable steps to level up your own leadership skills, to inspire yourself and others. I introduced the work of Warren G Bennis in his 1989 book “On Becoming a Leader” as a foundation to the learning. Bennis differentiates between a Manager and a Leader and I used his leadership characteristics as “hooks” to align and pin topics to. Take a look at Bennis’s characteristics below. Over the next few Issues, I’m going to hone in on these characterics and provide additional reading/resources and learning alongside practical steps for you to Level Up your Leadership. Let’s kick off this Issue with the first on Bennis’s list, the characteristic of “Innovation”. According to www.idealscale.com, “this is defined as the process of bringing about new ideas, methods, products, services or solutions that have a signifcant positive impact and value”. Cue now one of my favourite quotes “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”. You are likely to be following (supposedly proven) processes and procedures that have been in place in your team and organisation for years. And, it can be easy to relax into doing things the way you’ve always done them. To be “innovative” then, you need to be constantly evaluating the effectiveness of your working practices, both in terms of processes and procedures and your behaviours. Use feedback as a development tool which you can read more about here. How effective are your current working practices? What works well? What doesn’t work so well? What needs to change? What can you do more of? What can you do less of? What can you stop, start and continue? What are your competitors doing differently (and better) than you? Who is the leader in their field and how can you model excellence? What new technology can you take advantage of? Become adept at problem solving including tapping into creativity. You can read more on this here. Follow the Simplex process ethos that it’s good practice to seek out problems to solve. This will ensure a culture of continuous improvement. You can read more on this here. Be more innovative and you’ll be stepping into the shoes of great leaders the world over! |
