In the business world, it's typical to blend leadership with people management, yet they are two very distinct specialties. While people management is an excellent pathway for some individuals when the time is right, it is not the only way to demonstrate leadership, and it's undoubtedly not for everyone. I recently read that 77% of businesses report that leadership is lacking. While everyone identifies the value of having strong leadership at every level of an organization, companies struggle to discover and develop leaders.
Effective leadership is essential to companies, from retaining good employees to seeing employees put forth more arduous efforts and improve profits. It's also clear that lousy leadership is very detrimental to a company and can actually cause health problems around the globe and cost the healthcare system significantly.
Reflecting on my time as a high-impact individual contributor and my years leading large teams, my main recommendation for how to exert leadership is human-centered design.
To understand what human-centered design is, let's start with what it isn't.
Imagine you work at a middle school, and one day the principal comes to you and says, "kids these days -- they need to get off their phones. Let's design a crossword-puzzle board game for them -- they'd embrace the opportunity to get offline."
While your principal has good intentions, their intentions don't match your consumer's reality. Their idea isn't empathetic towards a teenager's real passions and isn't a solution that fits their basic wants, needs, and motivations.
What is Human-Centered Design (HCD)?
HCD is a form of thinking that places the people you're trying to serve and stakeholders at the center of the design, implementation, and innovation process. HCD is iterative, measurable, and results-driven. It concentrates on understanding dynamics between stakeholders across the ecosystem. HCD allows you— to create solutions and strategies that overcome challenges and develop opportunities to create value and impact.
UNDERSTANDING NEEDS HOLISTICALLY
Leadership influence and impact are about people, and people are dynamic from their experiences, perspectives, and behaviors. All are shaped by their social, economic, and cultural context. Understanding people subtly leads to more good and impactful design, regardless of what we create together.
CONNECTING WITH PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE
The best way to understand people is by connecting with them where they exist at that moment. If you are an employee-facing manager, I encourage you to leave your desk and immerse yourself in the lived experiences and context of those you seek to engage and understand in the design process, whether at a bank, a nightclub, or a person's home.
By adopting a systems lens and understanding the relationships and connections within your ecosystem, you can better identify how your product or service fits and what levers you should draw on for maximum impact.
Develop interdisciplinary teams
People often shift towards identifying with smaller communities and teams to truly feel a sense of belonging at work. While this is a human quality, as a leader, your role is to deliver a specific degree of equilibrium and remind the people you lead that their first commitment is to themselves. Their second commitment is to the larger team.
When you pivot into leadership, it's essential to develop interdisciplinary and cross-functional teams of people who respect and understand roles different than their own.
I've done this on teams I've led by facilitating interactive workshops demonstrating the value of different methods and perspectives. For example, I host short 15-minute interactive exercises weekly d to introduce customer development and user research to coaching clients. Suppose your team members can better understand each other's disciplines. In that case, they'll better understand when it makes reason to loop others in to collaborate. Doing so allows you to align an interdisciplinary team to progress in the exact direction more effectively.
Wrapping it up.
Whether you're already leading or managing teams or merely aspiring to one day, these changes furnish a roadmap and framework for initiatives you can begin to scale your impact and influence. To continuously grow as a leader, I urge pursuing resources and reserving time to level up in systems thinking, crafting culture, and coaching.