You Don’t Need an MBA - Alicia McKay

WHEN YOU ARE... YOU SAY YOU GET FOCUS ON

ADAPTIVE I'm learning to... Impact Influence

PROACTIVE 'I choose to..." Focus Performance

REACTIVE 'I have to... Action Systems

PASSIVE 'I can't..." Inertia Decisions

RESISTANT I won't...' Fear Flexibility

Let's take a look at the different leadership types.

RESISTANT LEADERSHIP
Sounds like: 'I won't'
The fear of change is evolutionary in humans. Resistance to change isn't a defect; it's a
sensible and necessary response to a world out to get us, where change meant danger.

To overcome resistance, learn to cope with change.

To lead through complexity, we need to be OK with change, and that requires flexibility.

PASSIVE LEADERSHIP
Sounds like: 'I can't'
The fear of mistakes starts from an early age. Mistakes are experiences to learn from.
For passive leaders, the motivation to improve is there, but is often confined to the ideas
stage. Making decisions that stick is a learned skill. When too much time goes into planning,
discussing or looking for approval, we think ourselves into a corner. But when we're
confident in our ability to find direction, we move towards action.

To overcome passivity, learn to set direction.

REACTIVE LEADERSHIP
Sounds like: 'I have to'
The fear of falling behind can make us reactive. The reactive leader has no problem with
action. They're busy, stressed and earnest, but all that activity masks doubt about how to
make the important stuff happen. Everything feels urgent, details take precedence and
there's no time for vision. We all need to spend some time being reactive, especially in a
crisis. Strategic leaders zoom out and break the reactive cycle by thinking in systems.

To overcome reactivity, ask better questions.

Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their

environment. Proactive people are driven by values - carefully thought about, selected,
and internalized values. Stephen Covey
PROACTIVE LEADERSHIP
Sounds like: 'I choose to' (or 'I will')
Proactive leaders are masters at taking responsibility. They plan carefully and overcome
constraints that stand in their way. Like everything, this is great - until it isn't, because the
shadow side of responsibility is control; the fear of letting go. Without trust and confidence,
our teams weaken, and stress levels skyrocket.

To overcome proactivity, learn to lead with purpose.

ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP
Sounds like: I'm learning to' (or 'I'm trying')
Adaptive leaders change course and evolve more quickly than their more traditional
counterparts, building a self-propelling resilience that compounds over time. Adaptive
leaders are generally a step ahead. They pick up on faint warning signals, see beyond the
every-day and are driven to make a genuine difference.

To move on from adaptive leadership, learn to mobilise others.

While change starts with you, it can't end there:

● You've got to have the right attitude before you can learn anything new (flexibility).
● You've got to figure out what's going on (decisions) before you can start shifting
things around (systems).
● You've got to be able to get shit done, so you can make things happen
(performance).
But unless you bring others on the journey, your impact will be limited. Move too quickly and
you lose people, which is why strategic leaders need to build their influence Taking risks and
breaking things is fine, but if you're doing it alone, you'll make more enemies than friends.

When you need to... You need... Focus on... Read…

Respond to change Flexibility Who you are Module 1

Set direction Decisions How you think Module 2

Make things work Systems What you see Module 3

Make things happen Performance Who you do Module 4

Mobilise others Influence Who you touch Module 5

MODULE 1 - FLEXIBILITY
Flexibility means you can bend without breaking. You need to know when it's time to bend
and trust that you can. And when things turn to crap, it's critical you can get back up.

Flexibility demands three core skills:

1. Awareness - knowing when to bend. You can't work with what you can't see, so we need
to understand what's going on inside and around us to respond in more useful ways.
2. Agency - trusting that you can bend. Most things are outside of your control, so you're the
only thing you can change. Awareness might open your eyes, but agency requires you to
do something.
3. Resilience - coming back better. Resilience is not about strength; it's about building your
capacity to accept, prepare for and overcome discomfort and failure, because those things
are inevitable.

You can’t work with what you can’t see

To stay aware, even when the signals are off, we need to do three key things:
1. Understand ourselves, as though we’re watching a movie of our own lives
2. Understand our environment, by thinking with others and paying attention
3. Spot opportunities for change, by joining the dots.

WATCH YOUR MOVIE

● It requires the ability to observe and understand your own thoughts, feelings and
situations as though you're not inside them.
● To be a flexible leader, you need two types of awareness: internal and external
(understand yourself well and how others perceive you).
● What motivates you to behave the way you do? We should approach ourselves with
curiosity, to ask: why did I react like that? What did I make that mean? Why do I keep
making the same mistakes?
● When in doubt, ask someone you trust. Truth tellers who care are a powerful
advantage.
● We should learn to observe our behaviour with wry amusement, as though reading
about ourselves in a book or watching ourselves in a movie.

THINK WITH OTHERS

There's a reason why speaking aloud works: building on ideas with others, and having to
explain them, makes your thinking deeper and clearer. We make 78% fewer errors when we
think out loud than when we silently work through issues in our heads.

PAY BETTER ATTENTION

Flexible leaders are impossibly and annoyingly curious. A curious mindset helps us make
fewer mistakes, innovate more, clash less with others and perform better.

JOIN THE DOTS

Creativity: 'the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make
connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena and to generate solutions.” Creativity
is all about joining the dots in new ways - finding unseen links and working out what they
could create.

People respond to stressful situations in one of five ways:

1. Resistance
2. Acceptance with suffering
3. Avoidance
4. Acceptance with action
5. Reframing.
In the fifth response, people alter their experience of a situation by changing their perception,
examining their underlying assumptions and asking themselves: what if something else was
true? What if this wasn't what I thought? What if it was going to happen anyway? What if this
was an opportunity, not a failure? What if I missed something important? What if this wasn't
the right job for me? What if I was the one in the wrong? What if this needed to happen for
me to grow? What if it's me that needs to change?

Resilience isn’t about getting back to normal; it is about being vulnerable to experience and
coming back better.

MODULE 2 - DECISIONS

Strategic leader know how to think, not what to think

If we've spent our careers doing our best and getting good results, this might be one of the
hardest things to confront. When we don't have an effective way to expose those biases and
safely challenge that thinking, our organisations suffer. Because we treat decision-making as
intuitive, many senior leaders find themselves fumbling around without skilful guidance. As a
result, they find themselves operating on a combination of intuition and bureaucracy when
it's time to plan for the future.

I see two common decision-making behaviours when it comes to learning from the past:
1. Dismissal. Here, changemakers seek to dismiss the past and focus only on the
future. While this may work temporarily, dismissal ultimately compounds the impact
of failures, destroys the learning opportunity and breeds resentment.
2. Rumination. In contrast, we might ruminate – Here, we constantly re-live and re-
experience the past and its associated feelings. This is a dangerous place and can
be extremely toxic.

The solution to both is reflective thinking.

Reflection is open and constructive. It focuses on opportunities for learning and identifies
areas to change. Reflection honours the experiences and feelings of those who were
involved in the journey, and creates a narrative that ties it into future planning. When called
in to lead a strategic refresh or reset, reflection is where I'll often start. Skilful reflective
questions are more specific than what did we learn? and should include things like:
● How did we get here?
● What were we trying to do?
● What challenges did we face?
● Who did we help?
● What's better now, because of what we've done?
● What weaknesses did this expose?
● What was the single most important lesson we learned?
● How can we use our experience to do things differently in
● the future?
● What would we do if we faced the same problem again?
● Now what? (My personal favourite.)
History matters... to a point. When it comes to making decisions, the past is both critical and
irrelevant. We need time to reflect and learn, gather data, debrief on successes and failures
and honour the journey travelled. However, we need to remember that the past can only
ever tell us what's already happened. The tools we used to solve yesterday's problems are
unlikely to equip us for tomorrow.

The lightbulb moments that change the way you think about a problem can't be
manufactured, but they can be nurtured with the right conditions. Human brain biases:
● We are triggered by loss. We get fearful and negative.
● We like things we understand. We naturally gravitate to ideas and solutions we
already understand.
● We get stuck on ideas. This makes it hard to stay open to possibility or evaluate
things.
● We like things to make sense. That means leaving out important pieces of
information that might contradict our narrative.
● We justify our decisions to feel better. Once something is decided, we look for
reasons why we were right, and avoid anything that indicates we weren't.
● We're swayed by the crowd. We take popularity as social proof of correctness - even
when logic would suggest it's the wrong move.

Bad strategy is the single most common reason for business failure. At its essence, strategy
is the way we choose to achieve our goals. It's about method ('the way'), choices ('we
choose') and outcomes ('our goals'). The figure overleaf shows the three key components to
strategy.

WHY Aspiration
Long-term
Includes: vision, mission and purpose
This is what we want to do (objective,goal, purpose)

HOW Direction
Medium-Term
Includes: priorities, focus, objectives
This is the way we work towards our objective
This is the essence of the strategy

Operation
Short-Term
WHAT Includes: plans, budgets, actions
This stage is all about doing

A strategic plan is not about prediction, it is abbott response - what principles and priorities
we can use to guide our future decision-making. It’s where we decide how to decide when
everything changes - which it will!

When it comes to decision-making, knowing how to think and what good decisions look like
isn't enough. Contrary to popular wisdom, what makes a decision good or bad is not the
outcome - it's the process used to make it. While good decisions do not guarantee good
outcomes, consistently good choices do tend to lead to consistently better outcomes.
Thinking should happen in groups when possible, to get different ideas.

Stay sceptical. Take the time to ask: What might go wrong? Is this realistic? Have we tested
this with the right people?

● What? Right thing. It is all about context; without understanding the context we can’t
be sure we’re solving the right problem or that the problem even exists.
● Why? Right reason. It is about outcomes and the value we’re trying to add.
● When? Right time. Timing is all about feasibility. Is it urgent? Prioritize.
● Who? Right people. This is the human element of decision-making.
● How? Right Attitude. Commitment to outcomes

MODULE 3 - SYSTEMS

Systems leaders see differently. They focus on how all the puzzle pieces fit together and join
them up in a unique way. Systems help us create new ways of thinking and working the
default. Systems leaders set up their environment to maximise success, even when
people are fallible. Systems make our success sustainable. When we understand the way
our business runs and we build robust systems, things change. We reduce dependence on
key people, decrease risk and save time and money. And thanks to that, we boost
productivity and performance. A system is a combination of different parts that work together
to make things happen.

System: How everything fits together (zoomed out)

Systems: Processes, tools and workflows (zoomed in)

The systems are building blocks of your organisation or team, enabling you to achieve a goal
or solve a problem. Done well, the systems do the heavy lifting for us. Systems are ways of
working that make it easier for the System to achieve goals.

Your organisation is not the sum of its interconnected parts. It is the product of the
relationship between those parts.

You don’t need complicated software or an expensive consultant to diagnose systems

issues; you just need to listen to the people that are held back by them (ie: annual surveys).
We need to ask three critical questions to diagnose systems:
1) Why?
2) So what?
3) Is it, though?
And we need to keep asking them, until we find the real crime.

We need to zoom out to see how the System works - our team, organisation, factory, sector
or community - and then zoom in on the elements of the process that are causing the issues.
We don’t want to fix everything at once, but to identify the most significant point of failure and
focus on eliminating that first.

How to design a new system or process:

 A. Purpose: Identify it first. Write the goal at the top, centre of the page. Every system
needs to have a clear purpose, but that will depend on whether we’re considering the
System, a system, a part, a process or a relationship.
B. Place: Around the edges of your paper, identify all the different environmental factors
that affect the System (ie regulatory change, market shifts, customer demand, etc.)
technology changes.
C. Parts: Next, identify all the different parts of the System. Draw or scribble every
contributing aspect you can think of, and tag them using words, pictures, symbols
and colours. Draw the key people who work in each part.
D. Processes: Start drawing arrows, loops and lines between all of your different parts,
to show the relationships and processes between each.
E. Prioritise: Look at each of your system's parts and processes in detail, with the goal
of stripping out or simplifying as many steps as possible and signal which parts look
like they might be optional.
F. Start again: Start with a fresh piece of paper and begin to build a new version of your
overall system. Identify opportunities to optimise, delete, change and invest, and test
your thinking with others.
Every step in this process needs the involvement or input of the right people who are
involved in, use or are affected by your system. The reality is that new systems and
technology tend to create jobs, not reduce them. Think carefully, what is the smallest step
you can take to improve the weakest link in your process. Start with the minimum and add
with care.

MODULE 4 - PERFORMANCE

THE THREE CS OF PERFORMANCE

1. Clarity - A clear sense of purpose that identifies where we need to focus and what
success looks like.
2. Coherence - Total alignment in the way we work and how we manage time, energy and
resources.
3. Commitment - Consistency, quality and accountability for performance.

Performance leaders begin with the end in mind. When we work that way, target results
drive our decisions.When we are crystal clear on what we’re aiming for, we organise our
lives and establish projects accordingly.

FOCUS ON THE INTERMEDIATE: While purpose is useful, performance isn't about

nebulous, high-level goals. It's about driving results. End outcomes, or benefits, are about
long-term aspiration. These outcomes are critical for strategic decision-making, but when we
try to link them with daily activities they lose their meaning quickly. To close the gap, we
need to focus on intermediate outcomes that we can be held accountable for, and that act as
a tangible lever to our big-picture or end outcomes.

CHECK IF IT WORKS: You won’t know if you picked the right drivers unless you check. So
set parameters early. Most issues stem from what we measure and when we set it up.
Performance measures should be considered at the very beginning, guided by our target
outcomes, and grounded in sound, relevant information that is useful for making decisions.
As a rule you need to choose measures that: 1) Focus on outcomes, 2) Reflect the big
picture, and 3) Are useful for making decisions.

No single measure or numbre can tell us everything we need to know. We shouldmeasure a

collection of things that, together, indicate in the change is heading the right direction. Make
measurements meaningful to check if things are working

Alignment between what is wanted and the actions to get there requires:
1) Set clear priorities: stop trying to do everyhing at once and learn how to focus your
energy. Multitasking is a myth. We can’t do two things that requires high-level brain
function at once.
2) Live your priorities: When it comes to priorities we need to walk the talk.The way we
choose to spend our time and resources should align with our priorities.
3) Control your attention: Performance is about quality and not quantity. Productivity is
about how we spend our time, not how much we have.
4) Manage Risk: Part of the job is responding to issues as they presnet, while another is
front-footing fires before they can kindle. Performance leadership isn’t about
eliminating risk - that isn’t possible. Your job is to be ready to respond when the worst
does eventually happen, and to have the confidence to pull it off.

To be a professional requires commitment. You need to:

1) Take ownership: owning the outcome, delegating the work. Effective delegation is
about empowerment and accountability.
2) Set bottom lines: A performance leader gives meaningful direction by:
a) Setting clear goals and expectations
b) Being open with information
c) Operating within a set of defined 'bottom lines' and behaviours
d) Carefully defining roles and responsibilities
e) Balancing autonomy and accountability
f) Monitoring helpfully by checking in, rather than checking up
3) Walk the floor: Leaders at all levels need to stay connected to the purpose, meaning
and impact of the work the organization does.
4) Respond well in a crisis:Performance leades don’t react in a crisis. They respond.
They don’t share fears.Doing this well requires you to:
a) Be clear about your intention (clarity of purpose)
b) Use expert information (guided by facts)
c) Seek genuine inclusion (not just experts, but different perspectives)
d) Communicate with incision (needs to be fast, frequent, clear and real)
e) Demonstrate integrity (not just honesty but transparency and immediate,
meaningful action)

MODULE 5 - INFLUENCE

Anyone can be and influencer if they are trusted and respected by the people they need to
reach. Real influence doesn’t mean you need to win everyone over. In the most workplaces,
just 3% of people currently drive 90% of the conversations. Strategic leaders are influencers.
What we do with that influence is up to us.
Influence is about intent, impact and inspiration:
● Intent is about you... kind of. It's about your motivation and commitment to serve
others. Leaders don't care about getting credit; they care about change.
● Impact is about them - the change that you need others to make. Unless we've
changed people's behaviour, we haven't had influence.
● Inspiration is about creating something bigger than you, or them. When we create a
movement, develop a partnership or build a tribe, our ideas take on a life of their
own.

Being likeable isn't just for attractive extroverts - it's about attunement. In The Likeability
Factor, Tim Sanders describes it as increasing your capacity to deliver emotional benefits to
others. Sanders argues that you can boost your 'L-factor' by enhancing:
● Friendliness: your ability to communicate liking and openness to others
● Relevance: your capacity to connect with others' interests, wants and needs
● Empathy: your ability to recognise, acknowledge and experience other people's
feelings
● Realness: the integrity that stands behind your likeability and guarantees its
authenticity.

Likeability is about finding common ground. We like people who are like us and have similar
backgrounds, beliefs, interests and personal styles because they reaffirm our validity. Once
we're familiar with someone, we're more accepting of their differences, and can skip the
initial stuff and get straight to work.

Influential communication is much simpler than we make it. When in doubt, aim for just three
things:
1. First, be clear. If you can only do one thing, devote your energy to making your ideas
accessible, meaningful and easy to understand.
2. Next, be real. Authenticity, credibility and likeability go a long way.
3. Last, be interesting. Grab attention and be relevant, but only once you've got the first
two puzzle pieces in place.
If we can do all three, our communication is credible, authentic and memorable.