Disruption vs Transformation: The Leadership Difference (with Craig Whitton)

And so maybe you can share with our audience that you say the only difference between disruption and transformation is leadership.

So maybe you can share with our audience, what's the number one leadership behavior that turns chaos into progress the fastest? And what does it look like in the first 72 hours, maybe?

Great question.

So our perspective is that the seeds of quality disruption management are planted long before the disruption hits through our day-to-day leadership practices.

And that's why we emphasize leading from a place of core values.

And we work with leaders to identify what those core values are, how they need to show up in decision-making, and how to build an organizational environment where those values are celebrated and highlighted.

And the reason that's important is because of actually psychological safety.

And so when your people that you lead are in a situation where they're wondering what you're going to do as a leader, if they know how you make your decisions and how you value things or what you think is most important, they're more likely to be able to predict your decision making.

And then when they predict your decision making reasonably correctly, because you're making decisions under a defined scope of values, that sort of creates a feedback loop for them where they feel safer with your leadership than disrupted.

And so that's one of those ways that values based leadership really feeds back into the process.

The key thing, though, is that you have to be practicing it every day so that the people that what your values are, how you typically embrace them, how you make decisions that align with them.

And if you do that, when disruption hits, your people are going to be confident in using those same values to navigate this disruption.

And to your exact question, Lourdes, about what happens in the first 72 hours, that's when you really need to center down and identify what's most important in the given disruption.

And that typically is fed again from that core values piece.

So it's a really important foundational bit of work for leaders to do is to identify those core values and make sure that they're using them in their leadership.

I should also make a distinction here because our personal values aren't the same as the values that our organizations choose.

And so if we're talking about organizational leadership, it's not about your personal values as a leader, although ideally those match up with the organization you're working for because that tends to lead to a more happy and productive environment.

But it's about the environmental or organizational values that all leaders at that organization are able to refer to when making decisions.