Fusion Leadership in 3 minutes? Check out this amazing and informative video by bookvideoclub!
Introduction
In “Fusion Leadership: unleashing the movement of Monday morning enthusiasts”, Dudley Slater shows how leaders can influence a company’s culture in order to fuse a team together, around a shared purpose.
Did you know that more than 70% of the US workforce report that they’re NOT engaged at work? They dread their job every Monday morning. What if we turned that statistic on its head and motivated people… how much more would they give back to their leaders?
The A-HA! moment
The author went through the experience of building a business that became wildly successful and crushed the competition. When he looked back, it wasn’t because they had more money or a better product. It all came down to better people. So he got to thinking: how can a leader create a culture, where the employees are passionate about the company’s success?
What IS fusion leadership?
Leaders who can fuse teams around a shared purpose first recognize the tension between their selfish ego and the corporate ego. Unlike a “servant leader” who altruistically puts the company before their interests, a more realistic approach is to realize that by putting the company’s interests first, in fact you’re serving YOUR interests too!
Think about it. If you appear selfish, you alienate and demotivate the people whose support you need in order to succeed. In contrast, if you appear to put THEM first, they will propel you to success. Mission accomplished!
Why you should NOT be the smartest person in the room
A great example of fusion leadership is stepping back at meetings. Typically, leaders love running meetings so they can show off just how brilliant they are.
Instead, they AND their teams can benefit a lot more by creating vulnerability and allowing the best ideas to come forward.
When people leave your meetings, who was the smartest people in the room? If it’s you as a leader, you’re not learning anything… you’re not growing. You’re stifling your team’s ideas, and make them reliant on your brilliance.
That’s not sustainable OR scalable. And eventually it puts a lot more pressure on you. You can’t grow within the organization, and you’ve boxed yourself into a corner.
In contrast, a leader who fosters independent thinking and gives responsibility can deliver much bigger results and climb the rungs up the organization much faster. Because they can leverage the brilliance of their team and be more productive.
Conclusion
Every leader faces an endless barrage of daily decisions that tempt their self interests, potentially at the expense of the organization. Challenge yourself to ask the honest question: are you behaving in a way that rewards yourself OR the organization? You’ll reach a higher level when you realize that it doesn’t HAVE to be a tug of war, and figure out a way to align the organization’s interests with yours.