Much of the writing on leadership (mine included!) concentrates on the positive stories and helpful hints, partly because it’s human nature to prefer the optimism. However, it’s also valuable to be aware of our blindspots and the traits we have that could potentially derail us in our leadership journeys. Career derailment typically occurs when an executive’s career is going well and should be progressing but it unintentionally fails. I’ve heard that roughly half of executives derail at least once in our careers (!) but given its nature, derailing isn’t widely publicised (unless high profile). 

It’s helpful for leaders to be sensitive to potential derailment of those around us too, especially in our own teams, so that we can offer support. There is some connection to burnout, although that is often caused by external factors wearing us down rather than inherent personality-based behavioural traits we have. The first step in dealing with our derailers is to recognise that we are fallible. And that imperfect human beings can still be amazing leaders. Acknowledging this frees us to learn to manage our derailers. 

Understanding derailers helps us better understand why talented leaders make poor decisions, overlook opportunities, alienate key people, and miss obvious trends, even when we genuinely want to do the right thing. Read more to see how our strengths and derailers are related, explore potential causes of stress, and unpack 11 behavioural traits that can cause leaders to fail. As you read, please reflect on yours, and their triggers, and do reach out to us if you’d like support in managing them on your own leadership journey. 

One of our corporate clients has been working on building their teams to be high(er)-performing, which is a worthy goal irrespective of whether you’re the function’s manager, a specific team’s leader, or a member of that team. Who wouldn’t want to be part of an awesome team?! Given the universal appeal of this goal, I thought it would be helpful to share some general tips on boosting team performance.

You’ve probably heard of the forming-storming-norming-performing-adjourning model of the stages a new team goes through. It’s also known as the FSNPA model and is built on Bruce Tuckman’s 1965 theory on the stages of group development. It highlights that conflict and tension arise as the team evolves. While that model is simple, I find teams (and their leaders) need more detail in order to diagnose the state of their team, and more direction in order to improve it. I therefore prefer another model, developed by Alan Drexler and David Sibbet, naturally called the “Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model”. 

Please be aware that shaping a high-performance team takes time, even with the conceptual support of a model, and willing participation of everyone involved. Developing humans (with all our brilliance, insecurities and quirks) is not as straightforward as a series of if-then processes. In fact, the stages in the Drexler-Sibbet approach don’t have to be linear – teams can move back and forth, repeating loops as needed. However, don’t be tempted to skip steps to speed up – you need to fully immerse the team in each one to ensure long-term success. Every group goes through every stage (even if they seem obvious or minor in your specific circumstances).

Read more to dive deeper into the stages of the Drexler-Sibbet model, which can help your team to discuss their purpose, build higher levels of trust and commitment, and reach their goals successfully (through disciplined execution). 

Many times over my career so far, I’ve opted to work in roles ‘on the edge’, often between established business units or sectors. Serving as a bridge or interface between them. Collaborating and sharing ideas from one context into others. And/or building new functions to galvanise change. Through experience, I’ve honed skills in identifying what inherent assumptions are being made by different parties and where interaction has broken down. In fact, silos in businesses originally develop for good reasons: the given area needs to become more specialised to extract greater value and efficiency, putting in place more procedures, governance and structure to do so. Over time though, it ringfences itself too much, atrophying in place and unable to adapt to changes around it... 

In this article, I explore how established organisations can change successfully, and the stages a new ‘initiative’ or function goes through as it becomes a greater part of how the business operates. Driving adoption of new technologies or approaches across a business (and/or industry) are examples: too early and the sparkle could fizzle out, too late and you’re left far behind. Becoming data-driven or digital-first, say. Another is product development, introducing new solutions (perhaps backed by new organisational capabilities built or bought) to lead the business into the future. 

Successful collaboration requires that we know enough about each of the disparate worlds to build trust with all of them, encouraging them to look up and outwards in pursuit of new opportunities, to make decisions, and to take sustainable action. Helpful skills to galvanise change include: an ability to connect the dots plus technical depth in one or more areas for credibility, communication, relationship building to cooperate across functions, and critical thinking (especially matching a possible solution with a business problem). At a team-level, you want a multi-skilled group, experts from different domains working together with innovation drivers familiar with design thinking and agile methods. 

A significant part of change in a business is about bringing the people along: evangelising a new direction, shifting mindsets, promoting adoption of the new approach/product/service/technology, hosting training & demos… And, these days, a meaningful proportion of my work involves these ‘change management’, ‘transformation’ and modernisation elements. Many people naturally have anxiety about how changes might affect their own careers, and the effort involved in upskilling themselves. I very much believe human intelligence will continue to be needed (in addition to the automation and speed that artificial intelligence can bring) in order to ask questions, identify problems, think of possible answers – perhaps some not encountered before – and create solutions. The visibility of an ‘innovation’ team, and its ongoing business achievements, is crucial to winning hearts and minds. 

The affected people should be part of the process of proposing new ideas – great ones can come from enhancing existing processes as well as exploring emerging technologies and experimenting. And, it’s not really surprising too that an innovation process shares strong similarities with a product development lifecycle: aspects such as concept, feasibility, exploration, experiment, design, pilot, build, pricing, signoff, launch, ongoing management… Many processes include go / no-go gates too where ideas are shelved to focus resources on more promising ones. 

I’ve seen these thoughts play out in different contexts, such as pricing & product development, financial reporting, investment management, and data science & analytics functions. It’s true that change may be prompted by different drivers (regulations, competitors, technology and more…), however, the organisation needs to evolve new ways of working, perhaps new departments or operating models, to respond. Read more to follow along as I unpack how the functions evolve over time / the different phases organisations go through, from early activity to intermediate to advanced, by which stage it becomes business as usual.