Grounded Leaders are Great

This concept of grounded leaders is something that I loosely took away from Professor Mintzberg’s session at the LAST Conference 2018 in Melbourne (it was an awesome conference by the way). I think this rings very true especially for a leader who wanted to create great culture in our organizations.

If as a leader you wanted to make a change, then the best possible way is to make a change with as much original information as possible. Most of the valuable information exist not at the top, you can ask as much managers as possible and you’ll still not going to get those gems of information. In my current position as a leader I got the most value when I sit down among the team as I get the atmosphere and my teammates are more inclined to discuss things verbally. Needless to say, this will work better if there are mutual trusts.

This concept is not super new though, in fact Toyota Production System has a phrase called “Genchi Genbutsu” which translates to “See and go where the work is” (Toyota Way). Again as a leader it make sense to go and see the dynamics of the team. It’s not to micro-manage, please don’t go to this route, instead this is to lead by supporting and observing or just being a part of the team really.

I will post in more details on how to use integral theory to build a high performing team, but one of the important factors is environment. Being a grounded leader who see and go where the work is, means that you get to see you and your team from a helicopter view, taking account of various things such as location, time, conversations, etc. Use those information to further improve the team together and in the process grow the leadership within the team.

Going and see where the work is and acting as a grounded leader is definitely something that any transformational leaders should do. It doesn’t matter if they have an official title or not, leaders exist everywhere.