Marsha Acker

The Future of Leadership: What Leaders Need to Know in 2023

What Does the Future of Leadership Hold?

From the beginning of time, we’ve seen leaders step up and either be successful or disastrous – and be remembered for the good or the bad. Throughout history we remember the ‘saviors’ and the ‘villains.’ Both kinds made a difference for future generations.

Leaders have come from all different backgrounds and cultures, and even over many centuries, but they faced similar issues and problems. One of them is conflict and how to resolve it.

How will leaders lead in 2023? How can leaders prepare for leading their teams in times of economic downturn or company turmoil, amidst a war in Europe, and during times of change due to lasting effects of a pandemic?

The Future of Leadership

First, we can learn from our immediate past. These stories of leadership from 2022 should inspire you as they did our team!

I’ve pulled together 3 things I believe leaders need to know in 2023. I realize there are many more but these seem to align with our culture here at TeamCatapult, which is to honor all voices.

I challenge you to take heed, prepare and take action. Your 2023 will be better because of it!

1 In 2023, Leaders Need to Learn to Dialogue

It’s not just you. It’s everyone.

Dialogue, the ability to have a conversation with others – without it turning into a shouting match, WWIII or ‘them against us’ seems to be missing from people’s dictionaries!

Why is that? Culturally, at least in the USA, we’ve done a bad job at teaching dialogue to our younger generations. We all have an opinion on things, but we don’t seem to be able to have conversations without trying to convince someone to ‘come to the other side’. Agreeing to disagree seems to be out and instead, divide and conquer is in.

If you are a leader and want to make a difference in your team, and your leadership style in 2023, I dare you to dialogue.

Do it!

Do it often. Do it everywhere. Do it with everyone. Practice, get great at dialogue and great things will happen.

2 Leaders Need to Think Together With Their Team

Thinking-together conversations start with listening.

We use this 5 step approach here at TeamCatapult:

Frame the problem or dilemma to think together
Invite difference and this will build a safe space for dialogue
Suspend having an answer and opt for being curious and candid
Host “listening and learning” sessions to encourage dialogue
Ban powerpoint as they do not support conversations

Problem solving – and the solutions to the problem, will take on a whole new meaning and purpose when people at all levels of the organization have the opportunity to think together and access the power of collective intelligence that exists within every organization.

Leaders, this way of thinking and engaging with one another starts with you.

3 Leaders Need to Listen to Stories of Leadership in 2023

How did you get started as a leader? How did you learn to lead and how do you work through mistakes as a leader? How did you avoid making the same mistakes?

While we can’t always avoid mistakes, and I’ll admit I’ve made plenty in my life, we can learn a lot from other people’s errors and missteps. In my podcast ‘Defining Moments of Leadership’ my guests and I talk about their triumphs, pitfalls and successes.

Their stories of leadership are offered with the hope that they encourage, inspire and teach you new things, new models, to apply to your own style of leadership.

If you want to

Be a new kind of leader
Improve yourself as a leader
Lead a better and more focussed team
Keep your team happy and excelling
Get better results from your team
Experience less conflict in your team in 2023

I highly recommend you subscribe to my podcast on your preferred platform.

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3iP7rc8
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3radjS7
Amazon Music: https://amzn.to/3tNVrOu
Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3iP7xR2
Stitcher: https://bit.ly/3NKoqLd
iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/3LtbmrC

The Future of Leadership Starts Now!

Season 2 is underway right now, while Season 1 ran from January – July 2022 and offers 14 amazing stories and defining moments of leadership to learn from.

What is your defining moment of leadership? If you can’t name it (yet), may I wish for it to happen in 2023?

~Marsha

3 Ways You Are Unintentionally Stalling Collaboration In Your Company

Team Collaboration at Its Best, and Worst

Are you unintentionally stalling collaboration, in your team or your company?

Collaboration is a word that leaders use often. They know that when their team collaborates, everyone wins. As leaders they look good, their team members are happy and content, and their C-suite, well, they are thrilled with any and all tangible results!

The definition of collaboration as found in the Oxford dictionary defines it as ‘working with someone to produce or create something’. Reason follows that teams who produce results are winning teams.

What happens though, when leaders unintentionally stall or ruin the collaboration in their own team? What happens when they create a mess of their own doing? Often, nothing! Nothing happens. Sometimes the blame isn’t easily found and even when it is, it’s not easily attached to any one thing or person.

If your team is struggling to collaborate, may we suggest you look inward first. Look to see if you might be the cause of stalled or even ruined team collaboration.

3 Ways You Are Unintentionally Stalling Collaboration In Your Company

When your team fails, do you also? Many believe this is the case.

Here are 3 ways you might be (unintentionally) ruining team collaboration.

1 Undermining the team

If you are not present in a meeting, why should your team be?

If you micromanage, why should your team come forward with ideas?

If you don’t communicate clearly and often, why should your team know how to communicate with you?

Team collaboration starts with you. The leader:

sets the tone and behavior for meetings
reads the room and creates space for ideas and input
communicates with the team and encourages two-way communication

Are you guilty of undermining the team?

Now that you know, can you ask yourself to do better?

2 Not listening with intent

Listening is a skill. As a leader, you need to listen with intent.

The intent of listening does not lie in the response, but the understanding of what is being said.

When anyone chooses to listen with intent, the result is hugely beneficial. Team collaboration, team morale, and team cohesiveness start to solidify and ultimately these become standard practice.

To quote Ernest Hemingway (Across the River and Into the Trees)

“When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say.

Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.

You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.”

Try that for practice.

3 Not remaining neutral

Conflict arises whether you expect it or not. It is human nature. Conflict arises when there are multiple people in a shared setting for an extended period, aka in a team setting.

Yes. Teams experience conflict. As a team lead, you are wise to expect (and welcome) conflict.

Conflict can come from:

Unclear team roles
Internal power struggles
Insufficient training
Differing ideals
Challenges with communication
Poor work environment
Harassment and bullying

and many other contributing factors.

In How To Navigate Team Conflict and Stand Steadfast in the Storm we learn that standing in the storm is about staying with conflict and difference instead of avoiding it. Because conflict is inevitable the leader in you needs to recognize that different points of view generates conflict. But did you know conflict can provide clarity, discernment, deeper understanding, and energy? For those reasons, we encourage the gift of opposition.

Three tips to help you stand in the storm include:

Cultivate self-awareness and management to stay in the situation
Learn to press “Pause”
Deepen your understanding of Group Dynamics

Exploring Tip #3, we find that models and frameworks are helpful for understanding group dynamics and for making sense of what we’re experiencing in the room.

Structural dynamics is a theory of face-to-face communications developed by David Kantor.

It provides a way to name the structure of communication as it’s taking place in the moment.

These are called

Move
Follow
Oppose
Bystand

Learn more about structural dynamics here.

The Agile Team Facilitation Stance

If you think you’re unintentionally stalling collaboration in your company, in your teams, this is a great time to learn more about the Agile Team Facilitation Stance.

I recommend you start here.

Then read my book ‘Art and Science of Facilitation’ and learn how to lead effective collaboration with Agile teams!

3 Ways to Lead Sustainable Change, Even When the Stakes are High

Leaders and high stakes conversations

“Lead Sustainable Change, Even When the Stakes are High”

What does it mean to be in ‘high stakes’and to lead sustainable change? Being in high stakes means being at high risk.

As a leader being in any type of situation that has a lot of risk can be called ‘high stakes’.

High-Stakes Scenarios leaders can learn from

A few examples of high-stakes scenarios and where sustainable change is needed include:

You have been going through a difficult personal time and your boss has ordered you to take some time off against your will.
When you gave your colleague a recent piece of bad news, he/she erupted, flew off the handle, and then later acted as if nothing had occurred.
A peer consistently spots deficiencies in what you do making it hard for you to deliver and yet that person appears to get away with not delivering.

As leaders, a variety of things ride on how we manage any situation at hand. While we might know change in senior team is unavoidable and coming, we might not know how we can best navigate and lead sustainable change in the organizational perspective of our team.

3 Ways to lead sustainable change

TeamCatapult coaches agile coaches, team and support business leaders, facilitators, and executives aka key stakeholders, in leading sustainable change. We know that leaders get stuck, especially when the stakes are high.

Here are 3 ways to lead sustainable business leaders to change a sustainable future, even when the stakes are high.

1 Read the room and a system behaviorally

To Read the Room (and the people in it, of course) is to know how to move forward and to lead sustainable change. It is the first step to take when you find yourself in a high stakes situation.

There are four kinds of conversational action in all of our communication.

Every sentence or phrase we say can be coded into one of these four actions that David Kantor calls “speech acts”:

Move
Follow
Oppose
Bystand

Did you know that the structure of our language informs our behavior and shapes our reality? So, by deconstructing these structures that sit behind our reactions, it becomes possible to understand and change the disruptive patterns of behavior that tend to erupt; sometimes without warning.Learn more about

2 Name the hidden dynamics

In our work at TeamCatult, we use Structural Dynamics to explore the range of powerful, but invisible forces that drive our face-to-face interactions when the stakes are high and organizational change is needed. This means learning to map patterns of behavior and understand how they show up at particular interfaces.

We prefer teaching how to map patterns of behavior in small groups and with an experienced team of coaches to lead sustainable change.

Learn more about

3 Work with human behavior in crisis

Last but not least, learning to work with human behavior in crisis is the last step to leading change. Naturally, this means when the stakes are high and often includes senior team members,

What does it look like to read reactive behavior in self and in others, and to develop the ability to lower the stakes for self and others? This work takes both personal reflection time and practical steps that help to integrate the concept and to develop the competency through practice.

TeamCatapult and how we support business leaders

Learn more about

Leading sustainable change: start your journey to leadership today!

Want to learn more bout leading sustainable change and how it changes at the organizational level? Want to put into practice to be ready next time you encounter a high-stakes situation in your team?

Our Changing Behavior in High Stakes workshop is designed for this purpose!

This is what you can expect to learn in this workshop:

Identify features of ‘contracting’ and preparing for high-stakes interventions
Know how to use Generative Dialogue to help a team and/or system reveal more about itself
Be able to discern the various voices and perspectives whilst remaining neutral and bystanding the system
Become skilled at observing, identifying, and transforming high-stakes behaviors that are contributing to reactivity
Work proactively with perturbance particularly when the stakes need to be raised and deal with associated escalation
Know how to lower the stakes for others using core principles for managing high stakes effectively

If you are ready to lead sustainable organizational change, in your team, you’ve come to the right team to support you on that journey!

How to Find the Most Impactful Leadership Stories of 2022

If you’ve come here to find the most impactful leadership stories of 2022, you are in for a treat. We’ve heard some incredible stories throughout this past year and can’t wait to share them with you!

I launched the Defining Moments of Leadership podcast in January with the inaugural season. Season 1 of the podcast ran from January until July with 14 episodes, while Season 2 kicked off in November with the goal of pushing out several episodes before year end before continuing into 2023.

Finding Defining Moments of Leadership

Before the first podcast episode went live, my goal was to find as many interesting, diverse and unusual stories of leadership.

While I started interviewing my first few guests with a specific ‘defining moment’ in mind, during the second part of season 1 I wasn’t always privy to a ‘defining moment’ until we recorded the podcast interview.

Finding defining moments of leadership is a journey of self-awareness. Not every guest could articulate their defining moment when I first asked them to be a guest. Yet every single guest was able to share their unique story of that defining moment when they stepped into a leadership role once the conversation started and we hit ‘record’.

2022 Stories of Leadership

After recording close to 20 podcast sessions I have a confession to make. Every single one of these stories have moved me and helped me grow as a leader. I learn something from every guest, and more importantly, I can relate to their struggle and triumphs as I too have struggled and triumphed.

Our podcast is not the only place TeamCatpult heard stories of leadership.

Here are three other places we’ve connected with leaders and heard their stories in 2023

Agile2022 Conference in Nashville

2022 was the year that gave us back in-person meetings with colleagues, friends and our online network. Several of our staff members attended Agile2022.

During the event in Nashville, we hosted a special event to launch a preview of my second book “Build Your Model for Leading Change”, handing out 250 early-bird copies of the book to leaders in the Agile community!

We laughed, hugged, learned and shared stories of leadership for three full days. What a wonderful time we had. Did you miss it? You can read the round up of Agile2022 right here.

“Build You Model for Leading Change” Book Club

After the distribution of those early-edition copies of my new book in July at the Agile 2022 conference, we launched a LIVE book Club in August to hear more stories of leadership while reading the new book together..

We used a four week 30-minute Zoom Book Club meeting model to allow for open and honest discussion about leadership and model building. We had fellowship, conversation, feedback on the book and we heard leadership stories.

These stories were incredible. If you missed the book club, don’t fret. The best of these stories will soon be told in season 2 of Defining Moments of Leadership podcast (HINT: early 2023!)

The book ‘Build you Model for Leading Change’ is currently in production and can be preordered. Stay tuned to our podcast, blog and social channels to find out when the full edition will be published

The Most Impactful Leadership Stories of 2022 by TeamCatapult

Last but not least, we want to share our Top 5 Leadership stories with you. These stories are our most-downloaded and listened to podcast episodes of 2022.

Lyssa Adkins on the Gift of Leading from Behind
Shannon Ewan on Breaking Through Limiting Beliefs
Mags Ng on Being Authentic and Extraordinary
Ahmed Sidky on Growing Human-Centric COO Leaders
Sarah Hill and Tony Melville on Co-Leadership

If you have never listened to our podcast, start with these 5 amazing stories of leadership. If you have listened, I encourage you to take a second listen and see how you can apply these lessons and insights as you prepare for 2023!

An Online Community of Leaders

If you love stories of leadership and want to continue this journey and listen to more stories, come join our Facebook community today!

Will I see you there?

~ Marsha

The Grateful Leader: 5 Ways to Lead a Team During an Economic Downturn

While we are in the middle of a holiday season, we are hearing story after story after story of disillusionment. People, our friends, being laid off from their dream jobs.

As leaders, we want to hold the responsibility that leads our teams to success and conversely to care for them during the “down times.” It’s easier through those times of happiness, but the challenge lies in those times of conflict or now during an economic downturn.

How do you show leadership when you yourself might be worried, scared and yes, possibly depressed as changes in the economy threaten your livelihood and your own job security?

5 Ways to Lead your Team During an Economic Downturn as a Grateful Leader!

Read. Learn. Implement!

1 Be Candid and Transparent with your Team

Be transparent and give people the ‘why’ when changes are coming to your company and your team. Tough news is somewhat easier to digest when you explain the ‘why’ behind budget cuts, team reorganization and possible layoffs. By speaking the hard truths, you can avoid pretending everything is fine one day, knowing massive changes are approaching. Being candid helps to reduce discontent and helps your leadership credibility.

2 Encourage Conversations

During an economic downturn people are scared of the unknown and uncertainty. It’s normal for your team to be scared. They are worried about job security, which translates into worries about their future, perhaps being able to provide for a family. One way to find out what your team is thinking and worrying about it to encourage conversations.

Expect these conversations to be about their personal life and worries, but also about the team. Team dynamics might shift as company wide reorganizations might be in the works. Talk about what this might mean for your team, and share how you’ll be present through all of it.

Ways to encourage more candid conversations:

Don’t skip meeting check-ins
Make it okay to hold ad hoc meetings specific to a situation
Dare to dialogue

3 Listen to your Team

As much as you can encourage conversation among your team members, be sure to listen as well. Listen with intent for what their immediate concerns are and if you can, provide space for candid results. Offer reassurances if they are available. Be willing to say “I don’t know…” and then find the answer.. Listen for potential roadblocks down the road, for grievances, and for conflict.

Ways to listen to your team:

Stay neutral in time of conflict
Stand in the storm when things are tough
Bystand in those high-stakes situations

4 Prioritize Resources: Products and People

As a leader, the distribution of resources is your responsibility. Prioritizing your products, services and people to get the most out of everything and everyone can be an exhausting task when resources have become scarce. Be prepared to shift when needed. If you have to move things around, go back to number 1, transparency. Tell your team what is happening and why.

Ways to prioritize resources:

Agile mindset
Avoid over-allocating
Find the BLUF and speak to it

5 Uphold your Company Strategy

Your company’s strategy should not change at the tip of a hat. A strategy is the long game. What can and should change, in times of economic downturn, are tactics. Tightening the belt might mean less marketing, less outreach, smaller projects, putting projects on hold. However, cutting all marketing, all outreach and all projects will not uphold your strategy if these are your main points of sales and revenue.

As a grateful leader, it is up to you to dive deep and come up with ways to uphold the strategy laid out previously, and take care of the budget, productivity and people all at the same time.

The Grateful Leader Leads by Example

Leaders lead by example, in good times and bad times.

Those who depend on you for leadership will be worried and scared in times of economic downturn. Your team needs your empathy, your listening ears, your attention and your devotion to them to be clear and present.

Let me end this with this beautiful quote: “When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in.” ~ Kristin Armstrong

~ Marsha