The Virtuous Circle of Healthy Leadership

We’ve all heard CEO’s proudly proclaim “our people are our most valuable asset”. No doubt a genuine sentiment fuelled by a terrific group of employees that continually deliver great results in the right way. Is the formula for success that simple? Just employ the best people and the results will flow? What differentiates the best performing organisations from the good solid ones? Surely they all seek to employ the best people.

Good people are certainly an important part of it. But we would argue that it is far more than that. In our experience the best performing organisations, the organisations where all employees are “hooked in” and delivering great results, are the organisations that have Healthy Leadership resulting in the creation of a healthy culture.

So what do we mean by Healthy Leadership? At an organisational level it goes far deeper than the collective leadership qualities of individuals. Healthy Leadership describes the ecosystem that results in complete leadership alignment up, down and across an organisation. When this occurs, clarity of purpose is achieved for every employee and then everyone is rowing in the same direction. The power of having complete organisational leadership alignment is unstoppable.

This simple model illustrates the key to unlocking Healthy Leadership. Of course, it presumes that the senior leaders are modelling the behaviours required across the organisation, but it brings into focus the pivotal role of senior leaders in ensuring that everyone in the business has clarity about what’s important and how they contribute to it.

Over the next few weeks we will be publishing a number of blogs exploring this very simple framework, its various components, and most importantly, discussing how to achieve Organisational Leadership Alignment. Is the front-line leader discussing with his or her team, how they connect to what has been identified as “most important right now” by senior leaders? When that happens, and everyone gets right behind it, people are indeed an organisation’s most valuable asset.