The 5 Leadership Anchors™
THE POWER OF 90 DAYS
The foundation for sustainable leadership success
LCP Global’s enterprise leadership solutions are based on aligning their efforts and goals with 5 Leadership Anchors to increase leadership capacity. They provide a foundation for leadership success and sustained performance.
Each anchor point provides leaders with a foundation for demonstrating how a leader’s capacity can be dramatically transformed when adopting these leadership anchors, compared to leaders who don’t have them.
The 5 Leadership Anchors™
1. Leveraging relational currency
The leader’s relationships
What is it?
Leadership occurs in the context of relationships — never in isolation. The key relationships in a leader’s world, who he or she interacts with, belongs to, identifies with, and is influenced by, give context to a leader’s identity, behavior, and performance. Relationships are the key to success and fulfillment.
Why is it important?
Without the ability to lead and empower others in the workplace, it is highly unlikely leaders will achieve their goals. Beyond this, we know that when they experience stress, trauma, or grief in their personal relationships at work or outside of it, it can be extremely difficult to perform at an optimal level, further increasing the pressure they feel at work and at home.
We transact in relationships every day. We make deposits and investments into others with the promise of seeing mutually beneficial outcomes. Other times they find themselves needing to make significant withdrawals from important relationships, sometimes learning that their relational currency is low — or even bankrupt.
Desired outcomes:
Fostering successful relationships is the key to leveraging our relational currency—value—to effectively manage up and down, build organizational trust, increase staff engagement, and empower collaboration.
2. Understanding motivational drivers
The symbols of success
What is it?
Success for each individual is far more personal than we think. Everybody is motivated by something — status, money, what they own and want to own, reputation, achieving something significant and life-changing for themselves or someone else. This leadership anchor relates to a leader’s symbols of success.
Why is it important?
Motivation is a powerful driver when it comes to setting goals and taking steps to achieving them. It explains why people behave the way they do, and what some are willing to do if something or someone gets in the way.
Motivation is heavily influenced by our passions and values, and what inspires us. In most cases it is directly linked to the vision or mission that drives us — to some this represents a strong sense of call or purpose.
Desired outcomes:
Because motivation is strongly linked to performance and personal fulfillment, understanding what drives us and our ability to discern that for others is key to increasing our leadership capacity.
It will also help us to identify emerging conflicts when others have a different view of success than we do — which can often impede performance.
3. Building resilient character
The leader’s value code
What is it?
A leader’s values influence all behavior and decisions. They represent how leaders want to be recognized and what they want to be known for. It is foundational to their personal brand and the type of organizational culture they want to create. At a deeper level, there is a question about the resiliency of a leader’s values in relation to performance.
Understanding this brings us to the importance of a leader’s “value code.”
Why is it important?
Resilience for leaders is foundational to their success. Having a resilient character is more than merely understanding what is important. It is understanding how important it is to you and to others when you are under pressure to compromise.
When the character of leaders is brought into question, it raises concerns about their reliability and, therefore, their resilience over time. Often it is only a matter of time for people’s values to be challenged when they enter into a leadership role.
Desired outcomes:
For leaders, building resilient character is not a simple task; it’s a lifelong process. As leaders, we know how hard it can be to make some decisions that affect those close to us, the people we work with, and the organizations we lead; but courage is one of the virtues foundational to a resilient character.
4. Empowering effective decision making
The leader’s personal script
What is it?
Every person enters adulthood with thought processes and behaviour learned and adopted from childhood.
Positive and negative experiences contribute significantly to how leaders think and behave, and forms their personal ‘script’.
This shapes the basis of a leader’s story…and future.
Why is it important?
Understanding how our beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors impact our decisions are not often the first thing we look at. To some, it is not considered that important at all. As long as they get results, that’s all that matters!
Having an awareness of this will help you understand a “behind the scenes” look at what influences the decisions you make and how it directly impacts the degree to which you empower others to be part of key decisions that need to be made.
Desired outcomes:
Overcoming dysfunctional patterns of leadership and being able to write a new leadership narrative will give you greater energy, a new focus, and the ability to look at situations and people in a totally new light.
5. Transforming goals and outcomes
The leader’s trajectory
What is it?
A leader’s trajectory or model of leadership becomes an important reference point to those they lead and to those who watch from a distance.
The way they lead can transform goals and outcomes — organizationally, professionally, and personally.
When these goals compete against each other, nobody wins.
Why is it important?
Establishing goals as a measure of personal and corporate success is the norm, although surprisingly, not always practiced. But why do some goals work and others don’t? Were they realistic in the first place? Did we have the competencies that were needed? Did we allocate the right resources and effort?
This leadership anchor brings together the previous four anchors and provides a platform for setting goals that align a leader’s personal, professional and organizational life. These should work with each other, not against each other. When they are in conflict, a leader’s capacity is under stress.
Desired outcomes:
Learn the difference between a ‘normal’ goal and a ‘transforming’ one; the importance of building a culture of sustained performance rather than focusing on a short-term fix; and how a clarifying purpose and passion provides a strong foundation for achieving greater outcomes.
Empowered users of the LCP Approach
Related Articles:
Coaching leaders is about more than just enhancing their performance
Coaching is not as much a tool or process that supports leaders in making lasting changes in their lives, but an evolutionary journey that helps
What is leadership capacity and how do I get more of it?
In a study of CEO’s leading multibillion dollar companies, Harvard Business Review1 sought clarity on how CEO’s use their time and how to maximise it.
Are we really surprised to find a link between character and performance?
In the 2018 LCP Global Leadership Survey, we asked 134 Board Chairs, CEOs, executives and senior leaders to respond to a short survey exploring their thoughts
