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?

Beautiful, Critical Data

by Mark de Cates | Jan 15, 2020 | Featured, Our thinking

Beautiful data, critical to understanding people and teams

We live in a truly fascinating and complex world. People, in particular, never cease to surprise us – both in good and bad ways! At Jyre we embrace the complexity and diversity of people, and we’re naturally curious about what data can tell us about them. We can’t help but look at a network diagram of our viewpoints ‘universe’, below, without wondering what causes the patterns and trends that we can see clearly emerging before our eyes. (Click on the image to explore it in full 3D)

3D network visualisation of the Jyre Viewpoints Network. Click the image to explore in full 3D.

Beyond curiosity, there are also pressing, urgent questions that our work asks of us. Challenges that we face around performance, diversity, and growth. And often, the answers lie in our people. But figuring out the right answers as business leaders can sometimes feel like divining for water. It’s so tempting to look for clear-cut answers. But genuine data on real people is rarely clear-cut: it’s rich, nuanced, beautiful, and subtle. Trends and correlations tend to be modest. Rather than shouting at you, the data whispers. But by listening carefully, with an open mind, it can give you a significant edge. Not clear-cut answers, but a 20%, 60%, or 70% edge.

Diversity of teams

We work with a lot of teams, and naturally we get to see a great deal of diversity and richness. We see ‘teams’ which might perform better as separate cohesive sub-teams; teams oozing diversity but lacking a shared foundation; teams with a clear set of shared values but lacking resilience and diversity in an environment where it’s clearly needed. Data, whether it be a team solo or viewpoints report, a visualisation or bespoke analysis, prompts the conversation and leads to action where it’s needed.

Showing a team their ‘similarity’ network, like the one below, is truly fascinating. It’s a chance for a team to have a conversation about their specific diversity – a conversation grounded in fact. What does the structure of the team feel like? I look like an outlier; what does that mean to our team in practice? We’re thinking about hiring X; how would that look, and what would it mean for us as a team? Network diagrams like this are great for showing clusters, cohesion, diversity and outliers. Like the greatest teachers and coaches, well-presented data won’t give us easy answers, but it can prompt us to ask the powerful questions that need asking.

Network Similarity Diagram for the Jyre Team (as of 2019)

This is the ‘similarity’ network for our core team at Jyre, simply showing members who are more similar in character as closer together, and those more different as further apart. You might say that the team is grounded at one end by our key founder, Mark Loftus. But there are so-called ‘outliers’ – like Lisa and Dan, who work quite differently, with different and complementary sets of strengths. This team functions well because of that diversity. Interestingly, we have noticed that dissimilar pairs tend to work remarkably well within a team (a subject for another time)!

Organisational insight

Stepping up a level from teams to the organisation, we get a different perspective. Teams become points of reference, individuals become anonymous but crucial ‘data nodes’, and we can look at our people in a number of fresh ways. As business leaders, we can start to ask questions about the relationships between teams and, crucially, about the effectiveness of our organisation as a whole. What are our key strengths? Our gaps? The violin plot below gives an example of how we might understand our organisation’s critical ability to maintain direction, compared to another division or organisation.

Spot the difference – a violin plot comparing ‘Sets Direction’ across two organisations

The power of data

Exploring data, especially in a visual way and with an open mind, can truly open us up to insights and lead to effective action. We know that it grounds us in reality, and if we stay honest, it can give us the ‘brutal facts’ (to coin James Stockdale’s phrase) that free us to actually make the best decisions. That might mean adjusting the way you hire, re-imagining your performance review process, having fresh conversations as a team, or deciding to take your own personal growth in a new direction. At least with the right data, the power is in your hands.

Creating a culture of leadership

by Arabella Ellis | Dec 11, 2018 | Our thinking

Can everyone be a leader?

The word ‘leader’ for most people brings to mind those in positions at the top levels of an organisation. The idea of viewing everyone as having a leadership contribution to make can come across as idealistic and unrealistic. It instinctively seems at odds with the reality of how organisations are structured.

Yet at its simplest level, leadership is a choice. We are leading every time we make a decision on behalf of our team, push a conversation in a certain direction or go out of our way to support a colleague or friend. It is less about position in an organisation and more about appetite and willingness to make a difference.

The risk of followership

So let’s we reframe the question: if not leadership, does an organisation need followers and followership?

Many leaders see it as their responsibility to energise their team to tackle and solve the operational problems, challenges and complexity which naturally arise in a business. But if the team has the capability to solve them, then why do they need motivating and inspiring?

If leadership equates to action, then the risk with a followership mentality is that it naturally tends towards inaction. The result all too often can be a sense of people passively watching, waiting, debating and feeling uncertain. And even worse, of people blaming and criticising their leaders for not being good enough – placing the reason for their own lack of motivation and satisfaction on their leaders.

A culture that creates leadership

Culture is effectively a self-supporting web of beliefs and behaviours. Over time these become leadership practices and eventually create an environment that attracts people who share their values. Senior leaders have a key role to play in creating this culture, but need to be careful that this culture creates leaders and leadership, rather than followers and followership.

A culture that drives development

People’s leadership contributions needs time and space to grow and people must feel this growth is valued. They also need to be able to openly discuss and reflect on their progress and the obstacles they face and be able to experiment with new ideas and approaches.

Developing our leadership contribution revolves around recognising and unlocking potential: identifying our natural talents, having a vision of ourselves making a leadership contribution, and working to turn that vision into a reality. It is rooted in the mentality that each one of us already has natural strengths of character and that becoming a good leader will be built on a foundation of these strengths. At the end of the day, people choose to follow other people because of their characters as much as their competence.

A culture that drives performance

Organisations that prioritise developing leadership lead in attracting, retaining, and nurturing the best talent. A developmental mindset empowers that talent to go beyond their comfort zone, with an awareness of their natural strengths. A culture that embeds these principles inevitably drives a company to high performance. It tends to adopt core values. It inspires employee and client engagement. It aspires to lead in its industry. It organically fosters innovation and collaboration while recognising and unlocking potential.

Imagine an organisation full of people that understand their own value, the strengths of their peers and their potential. Where every team functions at peak performance, understands the organisation’s overarching business goals and has a true sense of purpose and direction. This is the catalyst for business transformation.

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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