I was once given several stretch assignments as part of an emerging leaders program early in my career in aerospace at Bombardier. Leveraging my experience, I share four ways to accelerate development and inclusion of diverse talent.

Trust is at the basis of any high performing team. It can be built incrementally, over time, and often by small gestures. Trust is a belief that something vulnerable and important to me is safe with you. That “something” could be my thoughts and ideas, my project, my feelings, my reputation, or anything that makes me uncomfortable when leaving it at risk to your decisions and actions.

Trust building starts with having the right leadership mindset. As leaders, we need to firmly hold the belief that people are capable, trustworthy and have unlimited potential. This is a mindset of generosity – having the most generous interpretation as possible to the intentions of others. This belief provides courage that is sometimes needed to foster an environment where trust amongst our team can grow. When we work with a team, we start the day with a trust building exercise crafted to go beyond the traditional ice breaker. Genuine connection and understanding are the foundation for trusting environments.

You made it! You achieved a hard-earned goal or achievement or you go to the end of an intense project, the end the year, the end of something important. Now what? If it feels anti-climatic, you’re not alone. The feelings of ambiguity, fuzziness, lack of clarity about the next step or direction, boredom, or indifference are normal. We’ve had clients end up here from time to time, some even regularly land here as a part of a regular cycle of activity. One of our clients calls this the time for “coffee and contemplation”.

Let’s start by looking at the process of how you got to the goal or end point. Here we are talking about the big, transformative and monumental goals rather than operational or routine tasks. In the beginning of the pursuit, you started with some lack of clarity and uncertainty of your true ability to get to the outcome you want. With each step you took to get closer the vision and the finish line, you got greater clarity of the vision and increased confidence that you’d be able to make it happen. This clarity and confidence helped spur you on to push into higher gear and as the end came into focus, you sprinted to the finish line with an all-out effort.

Storytelling has a remarkable ability to connect people and inspire them to take action. They provide context and structure that aid in understanding complex ideas. By presenting information within a narrative framework, storytelling helps people visualize concepts more effectively. People remember stories when they include both positive and negative emotions.

The most compelling narratives honor the past, help us understand the need for change, and offer practical ways forward. They are a crucial step to harness your organization’s energy and direct it toward strategic change.

Behaviours are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for organization values. They provide the framework and metrics for assessing leadership and the culture it creates. However, defining these everyday behaviours can prove to be a challenging exercise. Behaviours are tangible expressions of values, the actions we can see or hear, and are the building blocks of a thriving organizational culture. They are objective, meaning that two people could describe it the same way. Behaviours can be recorded by a video camera.

When you are frustrated, annoyed, or disappointed there is a boundary that has been crossed. Boundaries are the conditions of our expectations that tell us what’s okay and what’s not okay. Inside the boundary are the behaviors and outcomes we want; outside the boundary is all the stuff we don’t want. When we are enthusiastic, pleased, or satisfied we are experiencing behaviors that fit inside our boundaries. Letting people cross your boundaries deteriorates your resilience and takes you away from being the leader you want to be.

Empowerment is about providing people the power and authority to do something on their own that’s within their ability. People are highly motivated and engaged when they are empowered. Organizations thrive when leaders get this right – we get more capacity with the same resources, more innovation to solve hard problems, and retain better talent. Teams accomplish things that were never before possible. Netflix, Google, and Salesforce are known for fostering a culture of innovation and responsibility for decision-making.

For empowerment to exist people need to be allowed, to want, and to be able to decide and take action.

Leaders often spend significant time discussing accountability and how to hold others accountable. However, it is not as common for leaders to consider the importance of collective accountability. Fostering a high-performance and collaborative leadership culture relies on embracing collective accountability. This happens when each team member accepts 100% ownership for the actions, decisions, behaviors, and outcomes of the team as a whole. Building collective accountability requires both a deliberate choice and a commitment to team development. Collective accountability is only possible when each team member commits to taking this level of ownership.

Leadership development is one of the key ways successful organizations can become more strategic and operate even more effectively. As an executive, I sponsored and was part of a number of really great executive development programs as well as some that were interesting and fun but didn’t yield the long term impact that we hoped for. What I observe as the difference to success was integrating the program into everyday business so that leaders can put ideas and concepts into practice with real activities or experiments to make progress.

When your leaders have the opportunity to work on real topics that matter to the organization and themselves, your leadership program can have lasting impact and reinforce the culture you want.

Here are six principles to consider when building your leadership development program

Inviting your team to present at executive meetings is a unique opportunity to showcase your team and their work (and your leadership). When your team has the opportunity to present to the executive, it is a career opportunity to showcase their expertise, credibility, and impact. As their leader, it is essential that you support your team before, during, and after the meeting to be at their best, have the opportunity to influence, and continue learning to become even better.

We have so many words to try to describe a hunch – sixth sense, our Spidey senses, intuition, gut feeling, instinct. A hunch is an intuitive feeling or suspicion that something might be true or important, even if there is incomplete evidence to support it. It can be a valuable source of insight and creativity yet we sometimes don’t use our hunches to full advantage.

Leadership is more than just achieving fast results. It involves building strong relationships, earning trust, and establishing credibility with your team. Acting alone without considering the impact on your direct reports can sabotage their effectiveness and damage relationships, which is bad for your team and the business. This can ultimately result in reduced engagement, productivity, and negatively impact the bottom line. The solution? Slow down, practice empathy and humility. Take the time to build strong relationships, have those tough conversations, and work towards common goals. This approach creates a culture of trust, autonomy, and collaboration that sets your team up for long-term success.

Effective leadership teams and strategy go together and each strengthens the other. It’s hard to be a team working together towards the same future without clarity of purpose, priorities and how we define and measure success. To have your team truly operate as team vs a working group, its essential that the team also has clear vision they are working together to achieve.

We do a lot of executive team coaching with all sizes of teams including some with as many as 16 executives. The larger the team, the likelier the question comes up “Is our team too big”? If you’re asking yourself the question, the answer is often – Yes.

To have your team truly operate as team vs a working group, its essential that the team has clear goals for the team to work together to achieve. Patrick Lencioni describes a team as a small group of people who work together to achieve a goal. He suggests that when your team gets over 8-12 people, it may no longer fit this “small group” definition and become very difficult to stay as a single team.

One paradox we face as leaders is how difficult decisions get made effectively with our teams – we know it’s helpful to gather perspectives to inform better decisions and yet we are also supposed to be bold and act decisively – so which is it? I think the answer is in the choices we make between these two polarities to fit the situation at hand.

The 2022 word of the year, according to Collins Dictionary, is permacrisis: an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events. 2022 globally has been filled with pandemic, war, volatile markets, weather chaos, rising inflation and more. As leaders you’re dealing with supply chain, talent retention and attraction, quiet quitting, hybrid work environments, economic uncertainty, rising costs for labour and materials and so much more.

Imagine if we could harness all the lost energy by eliminating the times when people in our teams said ‘yes’ but really thought ‘well maybe’ or ‘nope, not doing that’. That is a dirty yes. It’s is an invisible process that drags down the speed of every organization. Not only that, when this happens we lose mental energy, get frustrated with each other and erode trust – all the things opposite to what we want in great leadership.

This is especially relevant right now as many organizations are renewing their business strategy and looking for buy-in to new priorities. Exposing the dirty yes takes some courage – what if I get disagreement? How will I convince everyone? This is a great opportunity to practice ways to eliminate the dirty yes – success of those new initiatives is at stake.

So what does a dirty yes look like?

Have you ever started a conversation and the other person begins to explain everything around the topic you brought up without addressing what you want? (why, yes, of course… we have all been there). When that happens to me, I feel frustrated and not really understood. These situations make it easy to wish people would just listen more but what if there was something in your control that could change the conversation to get your ideal outcome? It starts with getting clear about what you want in the conversation.

You can’t make me. Oh, how I’ve been in conversations where I’ve been frustrated that the other person isn’t agreeing to what I want them to. Who was I really frustrated with? At the time I’d tell you the other person, but in reflection I was frustrated with myself. I couldn’t get them to see what was obvious to me and couldn’t figure out how to make that happen to get to my ideal outcome. I’ve seen this same frustration show up for my clients too.