Leaders who STOP find new routes to success

When was the last time you started your day with a quiet phone instead of a slew of texts, emails, and news that threw your plans out the window? As a leader, you must continuously and quickly adapt to obstacles and shifting conditions. While technology has made it easier to access information and collaborate across geographies, it can also encroach on opportunities for creative and strategic thinking. Diversity within organizations can foster innovation as multiple generations and cultural perspectives come together, but not without a foundation of trust. And changing societal norms, globalization, and political disruption force leaders into survival mode, leaving limited time to exchange ideas, adapt, and lead effectively.

Rather than trying to work harder or faster, we suggest leaders STOP!

The STOP leadership framework® is based on two fundamental principles:

1. Leadership agility requires a balanced, grounded starting point 

2. Leadership is a multidimensional, dynamic endeavor that requires skillful engagement of diverse people and systems across an organization

Leader agility

Operating in fast-paced, uncertain, and ambiguous environments, today’s leaders feel a pull to act quickly. However, prioritizing speed and urgency can create inefficient, ineffective, and unfulfilling busyness. (And it never ends.) Instead, stopping creates opportunities to survey the environment and gather consequential input. From a balanced place, you can adapt your focus as you assess decisions and their full implications. 

Engaging others

In order to succeed as a leader, you must be able to engage the full diversity of people and complexity of systems around you to achieve your organizational goals. There is no leading in a vacuum. A leader’s  decisions have both direct and indirect impacts across the organization, including  employee performance, job satisfaction, commitment, collaboration, and innovation. 

STOP! Clarify where you’re going and choose your optimal route

Have you ever been driving somewhere new and unfamiliar, and you thought that you couldn’t stop to find directions because it would “make you late”? While this situation may become a funny story later, it can create anxiety, deplete resources, and lead to even greater delays.

As a leader, you do not have time to waste. You do want access to information to make the best decisions possible. Applying a repeatable framework will help you stay agile. It allows you to understand the complexities of a situation through multiple key perspectives while engaging and motivating others.

SELF: Where am I starting?

The STOP framework begins with a focus on you. This is where you get grounded. Awareness of your own values, strengths, beliefs, fears, and priorities helps you understand your most common behaviors - - how you make decisions, the actions you take, how you engage with your team and collaborate with peers.

What are your blind spots? Blind spots prevent us from seeing the full situation, and we all have them. When we feel the pressure of time, there isn’t space to check for them. Unfortunately, not seeing your blind spots doesn’t make them go away.

Expanded self-awareness, of the good and the bad, actually increases your confidence and your ability to lead with your core values and strengths. As your confidence grows, you cultivate leadership capacities such as communication, relationship building, and motivation.

TEAM: Who’s on the team and where are they starting?

No one accomplishes great things alone. How well do you know your team? Understanding where they are and what they need is a critical practice that often gets sacrificed for urgency.

As a leader, you seek to strive to bring out the best in your team while working through challenges such as time and resource constraints, differing perspectives, and varying communication styles. The STOP framework supports you in engaging your team to identify critical needs – from individual skill development to shared resource requirements – and conceive novel solutions.

Engaging your team in solution development reduces the pressure on you to “know everything” and promotes team collaboration and development. This creates a ripple effect of increased employee engagement, empowerment, and performance that supports the achievement of organizational goals and positively impacts customers and constituents. 

ORGANIZATION: What’s the setting?

Even meticulous plans can be impacted by factors outside of the team’s immediate view.  Developing a dynamic understanding of the organizational environment is critical for a leader to fluidly adapt plans amidst changing conditions. 

Organizational challenges can include power dynamics, a lack of cross-functional alignment, funding constraints, and inconsistent or incomplete communications. The STOP approach enables you to more quickly recognize these influences, build functional alliances with key stakeholders, and mitigate risk by being attuned to potential shifts.

Applying the STOP framework fosters a deeper understanding of the factors at play within your organization and how they affect the execution of strategic goals. Over time, you’ll enhance your ability to anticipate, compromise, and collaborate across your organization.  

PEOPLE & PURPOSE: Why are we going and how will we know when we’re there?

In the day-to-day overflow of information and activity, it can be easy to lose the thread that connects it all together. Why are we all doing this? What is the vision? Who are we doing it for? How will they be impacted?

Depending on your role and schedule, it can be difficult to get timely input from outside stakeholders, such as customers, constituents, and volunteers. In an effort to keep things moving forward, assumptions may be made but can lead to misunderstanding and missed opportunities.

The STOP approach offers techniques for building your access to key stakeholder sentiment and enables you to align the efforts of your team with the organization’s vision and constituent success. Your team’s finite resources are focused on the right priorities and enable the organization to achieve its purpose.

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Applying the STOP leadership framework

The STOP framework is both foundational and flexible. It aids leaders in uncovering root causes and defining their vision. Let’s look at an example.

A leader with too many meetings and not enough time

During a recent senior leadership meeting, Ana received some surprising feedback. Her colleagues raised several questions and challenged some of the assumptions she made in formulating her proposal. The feedback stung, and Ana left the meeting feeling dejected. In the past, she might have fixated on what she perceived as negative feedback, but having the STOP framework enabled her to take a different approach.

Using the framework helped her identify things that were holding her back and envision what a more productive future state could look like. The clarity she derived allowed her to focus on making a few key changes to benefit herself, her team, and the organization. The following is a summary of her key insights:

SELF:

Ana spent most of her working hours in meetings. She had no time to do her “real work”, much less proactively plan or think. While preparing the recent proposal, she cancelled her 1:1s to gain back time, but this caused her to take on more work and reduced opportunities for others.

Increased collaboration across the team would allow Ana to reduce the amount of time spent in meetings and on tactical activities. She could then allocate more time each week to plan and strategize which would also reduce her stress level. 

TEAM:

Individual team members were working hard, but their efforts were disconnected. Many felt they were operating at a disadvantage as they lacked the resources or information they needed to fully engage and contribute.

Employee satisfaction increases when individuals feel a balance of challenging work and support from their leaders. By clarifying responsibilities and consistently communicating updates, Ana could enable team members to commit and take ownership.

ORGANIZATION:

Industry challenges arose and created a need to adapt the organization’s strategic priorities. As Ana and her peers sought to adjust quickly, they began operating in silos and shared information less often with each other. 

As the rate of change increases, the flow of information across an organization should keep pace. Prioritizing a simple, yet frequent, approach for sharing updates could enable colleagues to support one another and allocate scarce resources toward common goals.

PEOPLE & PURPOSE:

Increased uncertainty and changes left the team seeking an understanding of how their day-to-day hustle supported the organization’s vision. Across the organization, people were struggling to understand the priorities of their end customers and how they could make a difference.

Ideally, team members are able to connect their work with the organization’s strategic plan, particularly when priorities change. Making time to align everyone across the organization to its purpose would enable individuals to understand their impact which drives both employee and customer satisfaction.

Small shifts have notable impact

By applying the STOP framework, this leader saw several ways to foster significant change. She chose to focus on how her behavior contributed to the situation and expanded the scope to better understand her team, her peers, and the overall organization. With this knowledge, she prioritized protecting an hour of her day to address three priorities: team one-on-ones, cross functional meetings, and strategic planning. 

Ana quickly saw a shift. She felt more confident in herself and her team’s understanding of the organization’s priorities. People came to her to share plans, coordinate resources, and ensure alignment. More of her time was spent listening to others and asking supportive questions to help them articulate their ideas and their needs. Her team was more autonomous and collaborated with their peers more often. She now had time in her schedule to support newer leaders as they found their rhythm in the organization. And she could harness her enthusiasm for the work to motivate employees by reconnecting them to the end customer who benefits. 

STOP is the beginning

The STOP leadership framework® is effective for building leader confidence and agility while expanding their capability to engage the people and systems across their organization. But like healthy eating or working out, knowing what to do is only half of the success equation. Actually, doing it is the other. 

The Leadership Coaching Collective offers supportive leadership development in a group coaching setting to practice implementing and build fluency with these concepts. Developing your leadership capabilities requires time, intention, feedback, and support. The LCC’s small cohorts are the ideal context for increasing your leadership confidence as you build proficiency and connections.