Translating leadership into action

I’ve just got back from an intense two days in Belfast working with the brilliant team at Jo Hopkins Consulting (JHC). They’re specialist in unlocking elite performance in leaders and teams across sport and business. The team have a huge range of experience and combine specialist coaching with expertise in cognitive dissonance, counselling and global sport. They’re different in their focus on listening, understanding then developing support based on insight into the cognitive behaviour of the team or individual. With JHC, the person or team goes through a journey to determine then implement change that will transform their delivery - whether in the boardroom or on the pitch.

The exam question for me was supposed to be how to activate the JHC personality and expertise so their communications was as expert, authentic and inspiring as the team is. But, during the session it broadened as we addressed one of the very reasons I launched Strategy & Impact. How to enable leaders to feel empowered to use their values and beliefs so their language, behaviour and action effectively motivates teams around shared goals. This is critical to any team and organisation being able to embed then deliver strategic objectives and for leaders, crucial to making any organisational purpose statement meaningful and actionable.

The project with JHC has underlined my belief that for leaders and organisations to be able to meet challenges and grow, they have to connect belief, behaviour and action. It needs brand, communications to be hand in hand with strategy, culture, transformation and, above all, leadership. As Jo put it, when it comes to leadership, we need more polyglots!