Flex for better interactions, impact and outcomes
The Leadership Recipe
What’s the recipe for successfully engaging others? When we do our diagnostic report debriefs, we refer to the attributes, styles and competencies of a leader as the ingredients in a recipe for leadership. Every situation calls for a variation of leadership ingredients. Sometimes it’s a pinch, and sometimes it’s a dash of your leadership persona to manage, lead and coach to a step into a situation with agility. Agility is optimized using Flex Capacity, which is intentionally using what leaders have in their toolbox already..
If you’ve ever moved, you know the art of trying to make your furniture fit in the new space. You shift angles, reposition, and move things in and out of the space. Eventually, you find the right configuration. That’s essentially a leader’s brain in the Flex Capacity mode.
Leaders have many attributes and styles that they can leverage to achieve their leadership impact. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Achieving leadership impact and business outcomes takes situational flexibility, which encompasses people, processes, information processing, decision-making, communication, leadership presence, and interaction.
What is Flex Capacity?
Flex Capacity is the ability and agility to accurately engage others in a way that the interaction, communication, and experience create mutually meaningful conversations that have ease, feel effective, and lead to desired impacts and outcomes. To leverage Flex Capacity, you are open, curious, accurately read people, are accurately self-aware, and interested in meaningful connections with people.
Taunia MacAdam, a certified coach and adult learning specialist, has significant experience in fostering habits and skills in leaders. She describes her clients as “being students of good leadership.” She also emphasizes that leaders need learning agility, which is “a leader’s willingness to learn from experiences and apply those learnings to new situations with mindset, change, people, and practice.”
"Flex Capacity is a leader’s willingness to learn from experiences and apply those learnings to new situations with change, people, mindset, and results.” – Taunia MacAdam
Using Flex Capacity to Your Advantage
Taunia identifies the precursor to the active Flex Capacity behaviour as “the leader’s ability to slow down just enough to fully analyze a situation, and deliberately choose a course of action for behaviour with intention. ”Mastery is reflected in speed to the right decisions, motivating diverse workforces, employees engagement, and a confidence of self and the team.” For a leader to slowdown, they could have white space in their calendars between meetings, or meeting preparation about both the agenda and the personalities, or it could be as simple as a pause before speaking.
“The benefits of Flex Capacity,” she notes, “can create a competitive advantage for leaders and business as it provides the agility, responsiveness, and human centricity to respond faster to customer and employee demands, change leadership and communication. A leader using Flex Capacity is seen as resilient, learning, change agile, self-confident, strategic and empathetic. It’s a leader that people will resonate with.”
"The benefits of Flex Capacity can create a competitive advantage for leaders and business.” – Taunia MacAdam
The best engagements happen when you show up intentionally. If you don't flex and just show up as you normally do, you'll reach a fixed number of people. If you flex a little to meet people where they are, and are in tune with how they want to be engaged, you’ll effectively engage more people. Making people feel seen, heard, and understood is the goal of effective interaction and great relationships.
“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”– Maya Angelou
The Brain is the New Leadership Engine
Mental agility plus Flex Capacity allows a leader to fine-tune their style so they can better resonate with their teams. It’s a skill in which you don’t stay in your preferred interpersonal style, but rather you are predicting people, reading the cues, responding, and adjusting your style in real time to maximize your impact.
If you want to optimize your leadership team’s for peak performance, they need to learn Flex Capacity. We all crave a comfort zone, and a state of flow in our business days. Learning Flex Capacity takes us out of that, but we will achieve more in today’s diverse workplace and in the future when we leverage flexibility.
Flex Capacity: How Robust is Your Leadership Toolbox?
Great leadership impact happens when you’re well-equipped with:
Openness: Being willing to engage and collect feedback on ideas, having diverse perspectives, and interacting with people not like yourself.
Curiosity: Having an active interest in learning about others, the world around you, and the motivations of others.
Accurate self-awareness: Knowing your strengths, constraints, and how others experience you.
Accurate people reading: Understanding and interpreting emotions, motivators, and the behaviours of others correctly.
Valuing well-being: Prioritizing people, shared purpose, and relational wellness.
Empathic emotional intelligence: Having empathy towards others’ emotions that foster effective interpersonal relationships.
Impact alignment: Being inspired and motivated to achieve a common purpose, goal or objective.
The Platinum Rule
In our dynamic and diverse work places, the best teamwork and interactions will happen when we leverage the Platinum Rule, which is to treat others as they want to be treated. Rather than engaging others as we want to be, we need to engage others as they want to be. This doesn’t involve an inauthentic stretch to our style, but rather a nuanced flex of our style.
"There are so many points of tension in interactions and relationships, so someone has to flex. Who will it be?” – Lisa W. Haydon, CEO and Founder, Pivotal Growth Inc.
In our last blog about The Future of Leadership, we presented the Leadership Crossover, which points out leadership change with boomers and millennials both being in position, and in this push-pull relationship. The importance is about aligning and co-existing, and that means flexing regardless of your demographic.
Curious to know what’s in your leadership toolbox and your Flex Capacity? We can provide you with insights and action plans with our suite of diagnostic solutions. Our 5-page leadership diagnostic contains a Flex Capacity insights page, and helps leaders confirm what about themselves they can intuitively vs. intentionally use to do their best work.
About Lisa Haydon
Lisa W. Haydon is a seasoned operational leader and entrepreneur with over three decades of experience in banking, capital markets, technology, and professional services.
With a keen vision for aligning people, processes, and outcomes, Lisa has become a driving force in the field of leadership development. She brings innovation to the forefront by leveraging data-driven strategic cohort programs, generating value-added insights, and adopting AI-enabled technology. Her pioneering work with high-growth companies and high-performance leaders led to the design and commercialization of a proprietary leadership diagnostic solution.
She is known for her unique ability to navigate complex business challenges, understand diverse leadership styles, and deliver transformational results.
Lisa and her team are a group of forward-thinking, technology- and people-focused professionals who become a trusted partner in the pursuit of leadership-driven success.
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