An Impact podcast with Maggie Pearce, created for the Impact leadership playbook.
What makes a great leader? Is it certain personality traits or skill sets? A job title? Something you're born with?
In this mini podcast (15 mins), created exclusively for the Impact leadership playbook, Dan chats to Maggie Pearce about leadership as action. Based in the English Lake District, Maggie is Global Practice Lead and Senior Consultant for Impact. She has spent over 30 years in the business, working in almost every function and playing a pivotal role in the development of our thinking, practice and tools. Maggie is known for her creativity, pragmatism, relationship-building skills, and her enviable ability to make the complex simple.
In this podcast, Maggie explains how Impact change the narrative on leadership by reframing it as a special type of action – as something that emerges in the moment and responds to the need for change. And she outlines our practical three-step process, notice, decide, act, to help you start experimenting with leadership action and build your leadership muscles.
"You can't just do leadership. What you're doing is you're helping a situation by noticing what's needed and taking action. And sometimes it doesn't work ... but then you go again, and you go again. It's a muscle that you practise. And the more you do it, the more you'll be seen as providing leadership."
What is leadership action and how does it happen?
"Often people come at leadership by looking at someone who they see as a good leader and then trying to reverse engineer what they see them doing. 'What are their characteristics and traits? If I can master those, then I can be good like them.' The trouble with that is nobody can do that and remain authentic (and we can spot someone who's inauthentic immediately). And then the other thing is there's no general agreement about what these characteristics and traits are; the more you read about it, often they're even contradictory.
So we come at it another way. We ask: 'What is it that a leader is doing? What action are they providing?' We focus on the moment of action rather than looking at what they're doing over time. In the moment, what are they doing? So we've come up with a way of thinking that's noticing that something's missing; deciding what's missing and if you're in a good position to act; and then having the courage to step forward and take action. Then reflect: was it effective? And then go again, go round and round. The more you notice, decide, act, the more you're providing leadership action."
What's the value of this approach?
"It accesses all the brains in the room. If you've got one person saying 'follow me', you've got one brain (that might be brilliant) but you've also got lots of other people who could contribute who aren't contributing. It distributes the opportunities. Sometimes when I talk to clients about this, they say 'well I don't know if I want that level of people taking over and everyone thinking they're a leader'. We're not saying everyone's a leader; we're saying everyone is able to contribute. The formal leader still remains the leader; it's not a manifesto for anarchy. It's opening up opportunities for people to notice, decide, and act."
Listen to the podcast on Spotify
This mini podcast was created for our leadership playbook, an interactive resource capturing 45 years of learning about leadership.