You know it’s beautiful thing when the team you’re working with can see the patterns without you having to point them out. And even better when they can pinpoint the exact moment that things shifted, positively or negatively.
Standing around a rough timeline drawn on flip chart paper along the wall, the team, marker pens still in hand, reviewed their handiwork noting the highlights and lowlights, the wins, the misses, key activities, people leaving joining, policy announcements, restructures, changes in the market and so on they had recorded on the wall.
As they commented on year that had been, taking time to acknowledge all that they had achieved with limited resources and a shifting market, the leader called out “there it is, the inflection point! That’s when things started to go south. We stopped communicating, we could see what was happening and we were too slow to move”.
It was only in retrospect that they could see the inflection and while it provided a great ‘we need to do things differently’ moment (and let me tell you this leader grabs learning moments and uses them every time!), an opportunity had been missed and there were repercussions.
Inflection Leadership™ is about getting on the front foot, creating space to notice what’s coming, tapping into your intuition and experience to make sense of it, having the smarts to design possible responses or gathering the smarts around you to determine the way forward, and finally, the courage to make the calls on ‘what next’.
This can’t happen if you’re racing all day, filling every hour of the day with meetings and activity.
It can’t happen if you’ve set a pattern that everything comes through you and the team doesn’t know how to work together to solve or create.
It can’t happen if there’s fear about getting things wrong even though we have culture presentations saying it’s ok to fail.