Snippet – No.13: Prudence

by Mark Loftus | Jun 24, 2020 | Snippet

I cycled 203km a few days ago as a way of marking the Summer solstice, the furthest I’ve ever cycled. Days had been merging into one and I wanted something to look back on in future years, a kind of ‘before the ride’ and ‘after the ride’, a way of getting some personal perspective on our current world.

My ride took me through the Cotswolds – Malmesbury, Tetbury and up towards Cheltenham – through ancient landscape, sometimes on arrow-straight Roman roads, often on rolling, meandering lanes. We passed Neolithic standing stones, the site of a 3rd Century Roman villa, a 12th Century Abbey, villages that trace their identity over a thousand and more years.

There’s so much that’s wrong with our current world and ways of living on the Earth, so many pressing problems to fix. Yet as these crowd around us, it can be hard to feel there could be a far future, of people quietly enjoying the legacy of our generation’s time on this planet. It can be hard to feel it is even worth creating a vision of a better future.

Mark Loftus
Founder & CEO – Jyre

Snippet, Reflect, Fix

Snippet
Traditionally, prudence is seen as the mother of the virtues, the means by which we judge between virtuous and vicious acts. More recently it’s become synonymous with cautiousness and risk-aversion, out of kilter with our collective self-image as fast-moving and bold. In truth prudence is really about acting now in ways that our future selves and generations will thank us for.

Reflect
What will your self in 2 years’ time thank you for what you are doing now? And how about in 20 years’ time? And what legacy from this time would you like our inheritors to value in 200 years’ time?

Fix
When you find yourself caught in the urgency to keep up with the latest tweets, the latest stories, the latest technology, try to picture what people in the unthinkably far future might make of our current preoccupations… take a moment to breathe… and then act.

7 Insights on Leadership

by Mark Loftus | Jun 17, 2020 | Our thinking

When we and others around us lead well, life is better: we are more productive, more engaged, more open to learning, more fulfilled. But what is it that is happening? What is our understanding of leadership?

Here are Jyre’s 7 Insights on what good leadership is, distilled from decades of coaching and teaching leaders and helping organisations in creating leadership cultures:

1. What it’s not. Leadership is not a role (‘the Leader’), something reserved for a few, but a set of activities that everyone can play their part in. The more people who play their part, the better the organisation.

2. Leadership is centrally about doing things that help create the system in which people can work productively together and flourish personally as they work. By systems, we simply mean the connections of individuals, relationships and groups.

3. The following hallmarks will help you know whether your team or organisation is being collectively well led (thanks to Prof J Richard Hackman at Harvard University for these):

- the individuals, relationships and teams become more capable over time
- the team and stakeholders around them take satisfaction in what they produce (their work-output is high quality and effective)
- the individuals in the team get more personal learning and fulfilment from team membership than frustration and alienation

4. There are many, many kinds of leadership contribution – it is for everyone to find what theirs is and then to develop to be the best they can be. Our role at Jyre is to give you the tools and support that help you develop the strengths of character and habits that are the foundation of your leadership contribution.

5. We all know good leadership when we see it in others, but it is often more difficult to recognise it in our ourselves. Jyre is designed to help our users to recognise, develop and celebrate what it is they do that will be experienced by others as good leadership.

6. Good leadership creates good leadership – there are no winners and losers. If we can help others lead well they will help us lead well. Collectively, incrementally you will do the things that make the relationship or group or team or movement better – healthier, more effective, a place in which people flourish, better able to adapt, to shape their collective future.

7. The art of leadership can probably never be fully mastered but the results of trying will be good leadership.

Team Performance: 9 Questions to guide you

by Mark Loftus | May 15, 2020 | Featured, Our thinking

The high-performing, high-learning team

Where do high-performing, high-learning teams come from?

If you believe the status quo, it’s a simple question of starting with the right people, doing a bit of social ‘team building’, and then hours clocked working together… and hey presto, a High-Performing Team.

That’s what we find most team leaders do: put together or join a team, book a team-build, maybe run through a psychometric if you’re a fan of data, and then get down to business. Even if you’re holding regular retrospectives, you’ve probably found these focusing on the tasks the team performs, rather than the effectiveness of the team itself.

A simple structure for team development

In reality, team performance is a continuing journey of development. But development without structure means teams meander, struggling to turn good intentions into tangible performance improvements.

Jyre asks teams 9 straightforward questions and then provides structured pathways that help teams focus their development effort on the areas that will make most difference.

This 9 Questions model builds directly out of the 9 Character types from the Jyre framework, ensuring that individual and team development are guided by the same coherent framework.

The 9 Questions

So, we have nine straightforward questions to ask you and your team:

are we disciplined in working to improve our effectiveness and performance?
do we know where we are going and believe we are doing something meaningful?
do we know how to achieve our goals?
do we get the best from each other?
do we push through obstacles and setbacks?
do we know who to influence and how?
do we spot and capture opportunities along the way?
have we brought our purpose to life and feel motivated?
do we create and innovate?

If you have clear and positive answers to all 9 questions, and if the rest of your team and stakeholders agree with you — congratulations! You’re already a guaranteed high-performance, high-learning team. Of course, there’s plenty you can do to keep honing your edge as a team, finding ways of keeping yourselves sharp and finding routes to break-through performance.

What’s more likely, however, is that one or more areas represent gaps and that’s where the Jyre team pathways come into their own. They offer structured, self-supported development that systematically helps teams turn gaps into strengths.

Next, let’s put the different questions together.

Team disciplines

We focus teams first on the central question in the model: on team disciplines. These are disciplines that form the core of team performance and development.

The core of high performance:

Why disciplines? Quite simply, if you watch any sports team, music group, theatre group or any other performance group you will see one clear difference to most business teams. It’s that they rehearse, practice and train together so that, come their performance, they are as united and as effortless in playing together as possible.

By contrast, most teams in business and organisational life focus the vast majority of their time on performing the task at hand and very little on the disciplines of development: working at getting better at working together.

New teams

If you’re a new team, or new to team leadership, the chances are you won’t know the definitive answer to the 9 Questions yet, so we would usually recommend you focus your energies initially on the ‘foundational four’ questions:

The Foundational Four:

Exploring these questions will help you rapidly create a team that is clear what its purpose is, feels motivated to achieve its goals, has a good enough idea how to reach these goals, and has set a foundation of inclusion and valuing of each team member’s contribution.

The performing team

If you’re a team that’s been together for a while, there’s a good chance you’re already clear about your goals and what you need to do to get there. You may also be clear about each team members’ role and contribution, how the team can get the best from each other. In other words, the ‘foundational four’ questions are clear to you.

But you may feel that there’s a performance break-through your team needs to achieve, in which case the ‘central three’ questions could be just what you need.

The Performing Team:

The established team

If your team is well established and has been performing strongly for a while, it may be time to shake the team up a bit and see if it can find new opportunities, new innovations, new energy to take itself to the next level.

Re-energising the Team

Exploring these four questions will guide you as a team to find fresh energy and inspiration.

Team Effectiveness Review

A structured way to start is through the Jyre Team Effectiveness Review: it’s a quick way of getting your team’s views on the 9 Questions and serves as a diagnostic as to where your team should focus its development.

The Engaging Leader

by Mark Loftus | Mar 6, 2020 | Our thinking

Engagement matters

Most organisations know that engagement matters. To take one example, the Gallup organisation has measured engagement for decades with their framework (Gallup Q12) and tracked the impact of engagement on business performance. Their 2016 analysis included data on 1.8 million employees across 82,000 business units and showed that top-quartile business units outperform bottom-quartile units by 10% in customer engagement, 21% in profitability and 20% in productivity.

There are only a small number of factors that drive engagement, such as working for an organisation that has a deep sense of purpose. And key amongst these factors is the quality of the relationship an employee has with their immediate manager.

So, this leads to the question: what is it about some managers that means they get higher engagement scores? What is the distinctive pattern of their strengths?

Engaging or charming?

Who comes to mind when you think of a charismatic leader? Maybe the great public speakers? But also, maybe those who charm their way out of tough situations, who seem able to get people to like them even against their better intentions. We talk about a magnetism in their character, an ability to pull people towards themselves and their ideas. Engaging? Definitely, but in a particular way.

If we work for a charismatic person, we find their charm can soon cloud if they have a need to stand in the sun all the time, to be the centre of attention, for everything to be a reflection of themselves.

The Jyre data

In our Jyre data set we see a quieter, less egoistic and more deeply engaging version of the charismatic character: that of the Charismatic-Servant leader.

Their spirit is nicely captured in this quote attributed to Queen Victoria, contrasting her experience of working with two of Britain’s key political figures of the 19th Century:

When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.

The charisma of Disraeli is turned back from himself into the other person. Rather than a need for his audience to find him interesting, he invests in finding what is interesting in the other person and thereby helps them believe the best of themselves. It’s an experience we can’t help but find engaging at a level that goes far beyond immediate charm.

Where are your Charismatic-Servant leaders?

The Charismatic-Servant profile is a combination reasonably frequently seen in our data-set, but do you know where they are in your organisation? The chances are you won’t, because they are not likely to post their achievements in neon lights on the wall behind their desk.

The Charismatic part of their profile means that they enjoy pulling people towards them, that they enjoy engaging and even charming people. The Servant part of their profile brings a really interesting balance: they get their own ego out of the way and focus instead on the team and people around them. So yes, they engage people, but engage people around shared goals and people’s strengths, rather than around their own ego or personal needs.

When we work with someone with this combination, it’s hard not to be engaged! But there is a quietness to the profile that means they will often be off the radar of senior leaders looking for indicators of future talent, which often bias towards more obvious indicators such as having a quick mind, self-belief, and a strategic outlook.

Instead, if you really want to find where they are in your organisation, just take a look at your engagement scores. Of all the Leader types, the Charismatic-Servant leader has the strongest correlation with high feedback scores on ‘Engages people’ and ‘Creates trust’.

The twist

Not only is the psychological make-up of the Charismatic-Servant leader one which means that they tend not to promote themselves, our data-set shows that they are significantly more likely to be female than male, by a ratio of 2 to 1. Gladstone, in his compulsion to demonstrate his intellect, is probably more typical of male leaders, and Disraeli the outlier. Yet if engagement drives business performance, and the particular pattern of strengths of the Charismatic-Servant leader drives engagement, it’s worth wondering why more models of high potential aren’t explicitly built around their distinctive strengths.

Zest and Other awareness

For now we’ll pick out two signature strengths of Charismatic-Servant leaders: their Zest and Other awareness. Perhaps men feel less comfortable with the outward display of enthusiasm and positivity that is the hallmark of zestful people, but we’ll save that for a further article on the gender differences in our data. What is clear is that all leaders can improve their ability to be an engaging leader by building these key strengths.

So if you have a Jyre account, dig out your Solo and Viewpoints reports and take a look at where these strengths lie, and think seriously about signing yourself up to the Zest development plan.

If you’re not yet a Jyre account holder, just ask yourself this single question: being outwardly enthusiastic about life is as natural to a seven-year old as liking ice-cream; where did your zest go?

3 things that will make you a better leader

by Mark Loftus | Nov 21, 2017 | Our thinking

Are you a leader?

You might not think about yourself as a leader, but Jyre wants to challenge this thinking. Our simple idea is that everybody leads at different times in their lives and in different situations. And we believe that life does significantly improve for people who become better leaders and for those they lead: work life, home life. social life, maybe even your love life

When we, and the people around us lead well, magic happens. We feel more confident, connected and compelled to step up. We get things done more easily. Day to day experiences are more enjoyable. There’s less friction or wasted time.

We care more.

We feel better.

We are better.

So the question whether you have the title ‘leader’ in your job description matters much less than the pattern of your actions and the qualities of your character.

3 things to know that will make you a better leader

1. People follow people

Leadership is a personal thing. We follow people because of who they are and what they stand for. And this means others will follow you because of who you are rather than what you know or are good at doing. Jyre will help you understand and value your strengths and so be clearer and more confident about who you are as a leader.

2. Lead through strengths

Effective leadership learning does not come from focusing on your weaknesses. Just as the best athletes understand what disciplines they are suited to, so Jyre will help you understand what contribution your strengths naturally suit you to. Building on these strengths will be a more effective route to development than trying to cover off your gaps, becoming something you are not. Development is not about closing gaps.

3. Be honest about your gaps

No-one is good at everything, no-one has strengths in every area, and we all have gaps in the pattern of our strengths. A gap will becoming a liability if you ignore it. But rather than trying to turn a gap into a strength, why not get better at spotting and valuing others whose natural strengths can provide cover for your gaps.

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