Discover the highlights of our program from recent graduate Elise De Losa, Innovation Lead at IPC Health. We’ve compiled her top three learnings directly from her insightful LinkedIn posts, to give you a look into her experience. We hope you enjoy reading about her journey!
Through my recent completion of the Executive Ready Program with Women & Leadership Australia I was able to reflect a lot on where I am as a leader right now, and where I can continue to build and strengthen.
There were three models in particular I was able to apply that helped me grow most throughout this program. The first of these was:
1. The Ladder of Inference
Communication is a strong skill of mine so I was happy to learn I could grow further in this area. The Ladder of Inference is a hugely important tool in today’s world where we often feel busy, rushed, and pressured to respond quickly. Taking time to pause reflect on your reactions based on stories you may be telling yourself and how these make you feel, and cause you to want to react, is critical to acknowledge before purposely choosing your behaviour and response.
As someone deeply invested in employee experience, using this tool to bring the best version of your authentic self to your interactions with colleagues and stakeholders is crucial. It allows relationships to be built and cultivated. More than that, it contributes to strong teams with trust and respect that ultimately supports people bringing their best version of themselves to their work, which in turn, drive performance and outcomes.
2. The Skill-Will model
I love capability-building and enabling others to flourish, so driving performance was a key area I wanted to learn about in this program. I am happy to say it certainly delivered in this aspect, with one learning in particular that I found to be the most implementable to me.
The Skill-Will model allows leaders to take a step back and consider how to progress individuals based on their particular motivation and current skill levels. This then enables tailoring of the leadership approach, goals and coaching to what works best for where that individual is at at any particular point in time, and with any particular work task.
The skill-will model excited me because I feel it empowers leaders to help grow people in a way that has positive impact for the individual as well as their work performance to support the organisation. Whilst I am a relationship-based person and therefore aim to tailor my leadership to individual needs, I must admit I definitely felt this learning and model brought about a big uplift in my own capability helping me become a more impactful leader.
One more key takeaway to share, the next is to do with change.
3. The Four Doors of Change
Working in innovation part of our role is supporting change; whether that be new ways of doing things, or doing new things, or simply (read: not simple at all!) supporting changes in ways of thinking. There are many different theories and tools outlining how to approach supporting people with and through change and all have their time and place. Through this program there was one that brought a new way of thinking for me, so I wanted to share it here as my 3rd key takeaway.
Often in our attempts to support people to embrace an incoming change we are tempted to prioritise focus on the benefits the change will bring hoping to build excitement and momentum for the future. This is definitely a good step – helping people see why the change exists and how it can benefit them. However, it is not the only step, nor is it the first (or even near to that).
While we may often also work to ensure we acknowledge any losses people may experience within a change, discussing what will stay the same (both good and bad) is sometimes a missed step and opportunity. The Four Doors highlights the benefits of ensuring all of these important aspects are covered, as well providing recommendation for the order these are addressed in.
It is a simple tool that is easy to implement and further highlights the importance of true understanding of the impacts of a change and a commitment to a deep understanding of its impact on people.
I hope my key takeaways have helped someone out there.
