The Central Mindset of High Performing Leaders
The Central Mindset of High Performing Leaders
Well, in the words of a song “…you gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure”. If you get it wrong, you’re scuppered! Being too kind suggests you’ll be prone to smothering, which is not healthy for you or anyone else. But being too cruel is extremely unkind. Striking the right balance is crucial but not always that easy to do.
You may know it as ‘Tough Love’ or something like that. For leaders we call it ‘High Challenge, High Support’ and the highest performing leaders (see below) are expert at getting the balance just right. The mindset of ‘High Challenge, High Support’ is the golden thread which weaves through the leader’s journey, supporting all the various strands. Without this golden thread, sooner or later the edges become frayed and things will disintegrate.
So, how do you know if you’ve got it?
If a leader operates with a perfect balance of High Challenge and High Support they will be rewarded with consistent high achievement and development from their people.
Too much Challenge will be more stressful for everybody, high achievement will at best be random, inconsistent – the stakes are high and so are tempers!
Too much Support is often more comfortable for staff, but issues are not dealt with directly, people are never challenged to be the best they can be. This leads to moderate achievement, and under-achievers are pushed sideways but never out.
Low Challenge and Low Support leads to apathy, it really doesn’t matter whether anybody achieves or not – in which case you may as well pack up and go home!
“It is the combination of Challenge and Support – the both/and principle –
which really matters” (Derek Biddle)
But how do you get the balance right, how do you get challenge and support in “powerful and equal combination”, and why generally are leaders not very good at it? The underpinning concepts and attitudes may give us some clues.
Firstly, people generally respond better to praise rather than criticism (although criticism is better than being ignored!), so reinforcing good behaviour and catching people doing something right on a day by day basis is critical. This may seem obvious, but so often we throw a hissy fit when things go wrong, taking the good stuff for granted.
Secondly, you need to have a vision of people performing at their very best – if you expect high performance you are far more likely to get it. Put people down in your mind and that’s exactly where they’ll stay.
Along with these concepts the attitudes of Positive Regard and Genuineness form the bedrock, and you have to be very honest with yourself in assessing how well you deal with these:
Positive Regard means having respect for the other person as an individual and a positive belief in them as a person.
Genuineness means you are able to express your own feelings and tell the truth about your reactions to the other person’s behaviour. It means being direct, open and honest with the other person.
The high performing leaders have mastered all these components. A deficiency in any area matters greatly, and awareness and practise are key to developing your skill.
The Leading & Developing High Performance programme comes with a set of robust diagnostic tools, also available in 360 format, one of which will assess your level of skill on the High Challenge, High Support scale compared with the highest performing leaders identified in the research.
The research - carried out over a period of about 15 years by Dr Derek Biddle (chartered occupational psychologist) in organisations large and small, global and national, in the private and public sectors, all market areas - centred round one pivotal question:
“What do effective leaders actually do to create sustained high performance?”
Interestingly there were two key findings:
1) the highest performing leaders were remarkably similar and consistent in what they did and
2) they were not ‘charismatic heroes’ but ordinary people who had discovered a particular way of working.
This ‘way of working’ was found to be the central mindset of ‘High Challenge, High Support’, a process and a set of skills which have been beautifully captured and referenced in the book, drawing together some existing well-tested frameworks. The fact they have been captured means they can be taught …. master them and you too can be a high performing leader.
The Process, I have written up in an article ‘From Transactional to Transformational Leadership’ which can be found at the Ali Stewart & Co website.
The Set of Skills, 15 in all, is inexorably linked with the Process and also includes some which are rarely taught, like the art of Explicitness. These are described in the book and brought to life in the training and accreditation programmes.
So going back to the central mindset, if you are to truly realise consistent high achievement and development in your people you need to use “High Challenge and High Support in powerful and equal combination”.
Copyright © 2008 Ali Stewart & Co
Paperback book: Leading & Developing High Performance by Dr Derek Biddle
ISBN 978-1-905519-05-7 Published by PDG Books Ltd
The Central Mindset of High Performing Leaders - To learn more about this author, visit Ali Stewart's Website.
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“High Challenge and High Support used in powerful and equal combination”. This is a line taken from a book called Leading & Developing High Performance by Dr Derek Biddle – but how on earth do you do that?
Well, in the words of a song “…you gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure”. If you get it wrong, you’re scuppered! Being too kind suggests you’ll be prone to smothering, which is not healthy for you or anyone else. But being too cruel is extremely unkind. Striking the right balance is crucial but not always that easy to do.
You may know it as ‘Tough Love’ or something like that. For leaders we call it ‘High Challenge, High Support’ and the highest performing leaders (see below) are expert at getting the balance just right. The mindset of ‘High Challenge, High Support’ is the golden thread which weaves through the leader’s journey, supporting all the various strands. Without this golden thread, sooner or later the edges become frayed and things will disintegrate.
So, how do you know if you’ve got it?
If a leader operates with a perfect balance of High Challenge and High Support they will be rewarded with consistent high achievement and development from their people.
Too much Challenge will be more stressful for everybody, high achievement will at best be random, inconsistent – the stakes are high and so are tempers!
Too much Support is often more comfortable for staff, but issues are not dealt with directly, people are never challenged to be the best they can be. This leads to moderate achievement, and under-achievers are pushed sideways but never out.
Low Challenge and Low Support leads to apathy, it really doesn’t matter whether anybody achieves or not – in which case you may as well pack up and go home!
“It is the combination of Challenge and Support – the both/and principle –
which really matters” (Derek Biddle)
But how do you get the balance right, how do you get challenge and support in “powerful and equal combination”, and why generally are leaders not very good at it? The underpinning concepts and attitudes may give us some clues.
Firstly, people generally respond better to praise rather than criticism (although criticism is better than being ignored!), so reinforcing good behaviour and catching people doing something right on a day by day basis is critical. This may seem obvious, but so often we throw a hissy fit when things go wrong, taking the good stuff for granted.
Secondly, you need to have a vision of people performing at their very best – if you expect high performance you are far more likely to get it. Put people down in your mind and that’s exactly where they’ll stay.
Along with these concepts the attitudes of Positive Regard and Genuineness form the bedrock, and you have to be very honest with yourself in assessing how well you deal with these:
Positive Regard means having respect for the other person as an individual and a positive belief in them as a person.
Genuineness means you are able to express your own feelings and tell the truth about your reactions to the other person’s behaviour. It means being direct, open and honest with the other person.
The high performing leaders have mastered all these components. A deficiency in any area matters greatly, and awareness and practise are key to developing your skill.
The Leading & Developing High Performance programme comes with a set of robust diagnostic tools, also available in 360 format, one of which will assess your level of skill on the High Challenge, High Support scale compared with the highest performing leaders identified in the research.
The research - carried out over a period of about 15 years by Dr Derek Biddle (chartered occupational psychologist) in organisations large and small, global and national, in the private and public sectors, all market areas - centred round one pivotal question:
“What do effective leaders actually do to create sustained high performance?”
Interestingly there were two key findings:
1) the highest performing leaders were remarkably similar and consistent in what they did and
2) they were not ‘charismatic heroes’ but ordinary people who had discovered a particular way of working.
This ‘way of working’ was found to be the central mindset of ‘High Challenge, High Support’, a process and a set of skills which have been beautifully captured and referenced in the book, drawing together some existing well-tested frameworks. The fact they have been captured means they can be taught …. master them and you too can be a high performing leader.
The Process, I have written up in an article ‘From Transactional to Transformational Leadership’ which can be found at the Ali Stewart & Co website.
The Set of Skills, 15 in all, is inexorably linked with the Process and also includes some which are rarely taught, like the art of Explicitness. These are described in the book and brought to life in the training and accreditation programmes.
So going back to the central mindset, if you are to truly realise consistent high achievement and development in your people you need to use “High Challenge and High Support in powerful and equal combination”.
Copyright © 2008 Ali Stewart & Co
Paperback book: Leading & Developing High Performance by Dr Derek Biddle
ISBN 978-1-905519-05-7 Published by PDG Books Ltd
The Central Mindset of High Performing Leaders - To learn more about this author, visit Ali Stewart's Website.
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