What Leaders Need

Role-Responsibility

This post is an excerpt from a co-authored article, “Collaborative Role Coaching: Releasing the New Leadership Energy, Spontaneity and Creativity” by Andrea Bareet and David Matthew Prior.

As we coach leaders to increase their leadership capacity, we often hear a specific need in a variety of contexts. Leaders want to be able to put leadership acumen into action by being more innovative and creative precisely when it is needed. There is a wealth of leadership wisdom to be absorbed and it is exhilarating to intellectually grasp a significant leadership framework, but where managers and leaders fumble is often when the unexpected occurs. At that point, leaders use their default leadership skills to negotiate the presenting challenge. Often the leader’s reaction is the habitual one, and the mechanics go under the radar until later, when reflection takes place. Among the surfeit of published leadership wisdom, it is disconcerting to be unable to translate intellectual insight into action when a situation demands it.

In coaching leaders we have discovered that by exploring their role response-ability, we can help them fine tune their role responses and learn to be more creative and spontaneous when they need it. Role response-ability can be explored through analyzing the roles a leader enacts in his response to a particular challenge.

In other words, role analysis sheds light on what ordinarily is outside of the leader’s consciousness. This method of coaching, Collaborative Role Coaching, points leaders to the power switch of their spontaneity and creativity. When that switch is flicked, innovation is beamed in. Leaders describe this process of illumination as feeling spontaneous, emboldened, inspired, and at times, brilliant.

It is interesting that on a macro level, some organizations appear to be innovative and others not. Current theories indicate that organizational culture and its attendant attitudes and assumptions are integral to developing creativity and innovation.

Our experience as coaches shows us that on a micro (individual) level, within the context of an innovative culture, that it is the employee’s role response-ability (ability to respond in the moment) that dictates whether innovation will be present or not.

 

Role response-ability can be defined as the capacity to enact specific roles so that our response to a challenging situation is both spontaneous and creative.

David Matthew Prior, MCC, MBA is president of Getacoach.com LLC based in the New York City metropolitan area.