What could your leadership model look like?
Lasering in on systems, behaviours, communication and relationships helps us make a plan.
OVERVIEW
In designing workplace culture, there are 3 influencing factors:
The cultural norms of a company (the ‘expected’ way people behave, good, bad or otherwise!)
The leadership behaviours that other’s emulate
The individual capability and how people perceive their competence
How do we influence these elements? By focussing on what we can control and being really clear about how we want our team to behave in four elements:
The systems they use
The behaviours they endorse and role model
The communication they demonstrate
The relationships they prioritise
INTRODUCTION TO THE SBCR MODEL
The SBCR Model.
In my experience leading Happiness Concierge, I have come to realise that there are four guiding principles that, when fortified, make leadership pretty fun. Over time, whenever something went wrong, I was caught off-guard, or someone was disappointed or fed up, I discovered that:
A system wasn’t yet in place to safeguard quality
A behaviour hadn’t been endorsed, boundaried or rewarded
A relationship hadn’t been clarified, balancing both relational and transactional
A communication wasn’t clear, or hadn’t been reiterated
Wouldn’t it be neat if you could get paid in cash for your mistakes? In reality, the gifts are the lessons missteps afford us.
From my experiences, whenever a leader I was working with started talking about their culture, I started to share these lessons, and outline the four elements in the SBCR Model:
Systems
Behaviours
Communication
Relationships
As I shared this Model with leaders, it seemed to transport people from a ‘complain fest’ to actually being able to make a plan and focus on the right stuff. It was so much more effective than asking them to do a self evaluation quiz.
I believe that leadership is getting people to deliver a result. The act is transactional, but it doesn’t mean you need to be. But you do need a system for getting those results.
So, when a leader calls me, it's because they’re not getting the results they want. I give them an action plan of things within their control through radical ownership.
I ask:
What’s your goal here?
What type of culture do you need to achieve that? Or, if you already had what you wanted, what would be a ‘typical’ way of doing business around here?
What SBCR (systems, behaviours, communication, relationships) need to be in place to make that happen? Which of the four isn't strong enough, yet?
What do you need to do now, that you’re not currently doing, to make that happen?
When I outline SBCR with leaders, discuss my own experiences doing this work, and provide the four elements where gaps typically are, we have a completely different conversation. We move from “Sarah isn’t performing”, to, “What needs to be in place for Sarah to have the best chance at succeeding here?”. What ‘Sarah’ does with those conditions is up to her. She’s an adult with agency and choice. But she can’t achieve a result without the right conditions. It's a bit like asking someone to run in quicksand. You can hope, or pray, they can pull it off, but without flat ground, or running shoes, it’ll be impossible.
Let’s review the SBCR Model in action.
These are all leadership traits and systems.
Organised Systems
Efficient and effective workflow
Expectations extrapolated and clarified
Timely, transparent reporting
Consistent delivery
Quality control
Culture (yes, culture is a system!)
Accountable Behaviours
Outcome drive
Relationship with success
Emotional regulation
Responsibility
Accountability
Communicating Ownership
Confidence
Listening skills
Feedback (ability to receive, action and give feedback)
Speaking skills
Writing skills
Respectful Relationships
Health
Boundaries
Capacity to support others
Trust
Judgement
Stakeholder relationships
Work is not a community, or a family, although it sure can feel like it at times. It's a system.
And within that system, it is entirely within our control to create the conditions for people to behave, communicate, relate to and operate within a system of our own design. What they do with it is up to them.
If people don't have clarity on your SBCR Model, you can guarantee they're gonna use their own. If you let your team create their own system to operate within, you're not leading a team: you're hosting a get together where everyone happens to get paid.
When we look at leadership this way, isn’t it neat to have a reliable, checklist of sorts, to focus on developing? After all, I don’t need a 95-question-long quiz to tell me what I’m bad at. I can just look at my results and ask myself whether I’m getting what I need to succeed, or not. I can then consult the SBCR Model and highlight something that isn’t present, or working well (yet).
When we focus on the SBCR, we can test a smaller element - a system, behaviour, communication or relationship - and make tiny edits.
And over time, those edits really add up.