Influential Leadership is an Apex Skill
an Apex Skill,
like other skills, is based on information we learn, that we turn into knowledge and then practice relentlessly until it becomes a skill.
Influential Leadership is at the ‘Apex’ because it goes beyond our background, genetics, education, and social and technical skills.
Leadership Purpose
To influence and shape life events, conditions and circumstances for the betterment of people’s lives.
Systems Theory
The conceptual framework that we use to recognise there are multiple interrelated and mutually influencing systems of human and natural origins, and that what we do as humans has consequences in and across these systems.
Social Agency
The capability to think critically, choose smartly and act with productive social purpose.
Social Agency is founded on Self-efficacy, which is:
A person’s belief in their capabilities to produce chosen levels of performance that influence events, conditions and circumstances that affect their and other’s lives.
The Philosophy
The unconditional acceptance that the quality and value of each life is inseparable from other’s lives, thus establishing Leadership’s foundation and purpose.
The Principles
The fundamental truths that guide leadership behaviours towards productive Outcomes.
The Behavioural Attributes
The way leadership is practiced to ensure productive Outcomes.
Leadership Moments
An event, condition or circumstance that activates the practice of Leadership.
Leadership Outcomes
The beneficial consequences for people’s lived lives and life trajectories that arise from the practice of Leadership.
REVolution
The formalities of the Architecture, which might look complex at first, must not detract from the heart of Influential Leadership, which is its PURPOSE.
Leadership is a social construct, something created by humans for human purposes. The ways in which legacy leadership forms have evolved since human #1 arrived do not serve us properly any longer—neither humans, nor other sentient beings nor our planet in general.
Influential Leadership purposefully breaks with failed ways of viewing and practicing leadership.
It cannot be business as usual.
The Influential Leadership Philosophy gives rise to the Principles and Behavioural Attributes as follows
The Eight Principles
1. I lead by choice
2. I go first
3. I take personal responsibility
4. I influence and shape lives through social agency
5. I keep people at the centre, as both subject and object
6. I lead anywhere and at anytime
7. I benefit with others
8. I shape change for the better
The Eight Behavioural Attributes
1. I am self-aware
2. I am courageous
3. I am hopeful
4. I am principled
5. I am purposeful
6. I am questioning
7. I am strategic
8. I am thoughtful
The Karoo is a unique and distinctive place
The Karoo is an elongated semi-desert area in the southwestern part of South Africa, made up of two zones.
The ‘Klein’ (small) Karoo lies towards the coastal plateau, while the ‘Groot’ (great) Karoo lies inland on the northern side of a mountain range.
The Karoo covers almost one-third (395,000 square km) of South Africa, which is similar in size to Vietnam or a shade larger than Germany or Norway.
The Karoo derives its name from the original people who lived in these parts, the Khoi.
They aptly referred to the area as Garo, a hard, dry, thirsty land.
The Karoo is represented in my Karoo’s logo by the semi-desert colours of shales, browns and greens, the scorching burned orange, the life-saving windpump and the ever-watchful Meerkat.
These are complimented by the original National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) font.
Read more here: The Karoo
The Karoo and Influential Leadership
It is a challenging place, the Karoo.
To survive and thrive requires one to be indomitable, to have foresight, to be resourceful and to show respect.
It is a place where a little needs to go a long way.
It might appear lifeless, until you pay attention to the detail.
The Karoo has no entitlements, there is just responsibility.
At first encounter the Karoo may seem arid, desolate and unforgiving,
but to those who know it, it is a land of secret beauty
and infinite variety.
Eve Palmer
Who is Colin?
We are mostly what we choose to do, or not do.
This is, after all, the essence of the Influential Leadership System – my social agency to think, choose and act (do).
So, answering the question who is Colin? can be left to the things I have done. However, let us keep in mind, that our lives are also greater than the sum of what we catalogue as our deeds and achievements. We know that both success and failure are outcomes of things done, not as objects in their own right.
At school I began to discover that the formalities of positional and role leadership were a misnomer. In senior grades I was invariably appointed the ‘class captain’. I was appointed the first rugby team vice captain, the deputy head boy… none of these things made me a leader, even if on occasions I did behave like one (unknowingly).
While I learned the required subjects’ contents to pass exams, there was never even a thought about what learning to lead might be. That was just left to the universe. Thrust into the role of a leader, but never prepared for it. A massive lesson how not to do things!
Then came university. I was an example of a distracted and undisciplined student. However, I did discover subject content that interested me and helped me to think further than preparing for a standard career and joining the treadmill of suburban life.
Economics. Political Science. Philosophy.
Next on my journey was military service – a far cry from a liberal university environment.
Four years later I had completed two officer’s courses in two different arms of service.
The Victor Ludorum was mine, once.
There were many practical lessons in leadership and mis-leadership.
Since then?
Further formal studies in South Africa, Germany and the USA.
Strategy. Public Finance. Banking. Asset Management. Leadership.
Amongst others, I completed the Centre for Creative Leadership’s so-called C-Suite leadership programme, Leadership at the Peak, in the USA.
Lesson? Not leadership in my book.
Further education: traveling through 33 countries. Learning what ‘other’ means, how it feels to walk in another’s shoes, and how all humans seek a better life in their own ways.
Lesson? People ‘in charge’ are mostly in it for themselves and those on the outside are insufficiently invested in their own conditions – they have not recognised their social agency. Both groups are complicit in the status quo.
On the journey to Karoo and Influential Leadership I have been a macro-economics researcher, an economic policy advisor in National Treasury, a fiscal policy advisor to South Africa’s Constitutional Negotiations, an academic teaching fiscal policy, the research director at the Financial and Fiscal Commission, the Managing Director of the Nedcor Bank Management Company, the executive director of the South African banking industry’s Mzansi Programme, and the founder and director of InsightWorx a specialist financial markets development enterprise.
And, after being a runner for 30 years, I discovered the wheel. I fell in love with mountain biking. It has taken me across the breadth of Southern Africa and the South of France, but mainly to The Karoo!
These are some of the things that have produced me and Influential Leadership and my determination to offer its leverage to others.
Life demands that I make choices, all the time.
The smarter my choices, the better my life - not only my life, but also the people I have influence over and the institutions I function in.
So, how do you and I make the smartest choices?
Through our social agency, which is our capability to think critically, choose smartly, then act productively, time after time.
This is being Apex Skilled.
Come and join us.
Colin
