As a leader, it’s important to get up on the balcony

I posted last week about the WEF top skills for 2023, with analytical and creative thinking at top of the list. A key role for leaders is to not only create the right environment for their team to do their best thinking, but create that environment for themselves as well.
 
This has been one of the lightbulb moments for a lot of leaders on our adaptive leadership programme – giving themselves ‘permission to think’ and viewing that as an integral part of how they deliver value as a leader. CEOs get this - strategic thinking is an expected part of their job and it’s rare to find a successful CEO who doesn’t do this.
 
It’s interesting when you speak to leaders in the next layers of the organisation. In a lot of cases, they have been promoted due to their delivery or technical capabilities, getting sh*t done. Now that they are in leadership roles, they struggle to see thinking time as ‘real’ work. They have a sense of guilt setting aside time to step back from the onslaught of meetings and activity just to think. In this scenario, I always say that guilt is a wasted emotion. If you as the leader aren’t doing this thinking to help your team deliver more effectively - then who will?

We like using the metaphor of being on the dancefloor versus the balcony. The dancefloor is where you are in the thick of it, in execution mode. The balcony is where you pause and come out of the detail/delivery, take a broader view of the patterns, direction of travel, roadblocks, key relationships, priorities – notice what needs to change and guide your team to adjust and align. If you are on the dancefloor all the time, you lose this perspective and can get caught up in the ‘doing’ – missing the opportunity to course-correct if needed. We all gravitate to what gives us a meaningful sense of progress, and the dancefloor has plenty of ‘busy’ work for us to do to make ourselves feel productive. This is why it takes effort to get up on the balcony. You will find problems that aren’t an easy fix, relationships that are tricky and necessary change that may cause disruption.

We task our programme participants to identify when and where they do their best thinking, commit to a plan and hold themselves accountable for balcony time (being unapologetic about protecting this time). Some go for a walk/run/swim, some think in the shower, on their commute, or set aside 15 minutes on a Monday or Friday - whatever works best for them. There is a noticeable difference in those who commit to doing this by the end of the programme - they are no less busy, but this thinking time helps calm the mind, and prioritise where their energy needs to go. They start thinking about how they can help their team members have this balcony time too, and how they can facilitate this across teams (great for breaking down silos).
 
How will you carve out this balcony time in your role? And what will happen if you don’t?