Leaders’ Vantage Points

Humans at Work with Michael Glazer

Everyone who holds a position of leadership has five key Vantage Points from which they can build positive momentum and high performance. Building awareness through exploring each one helps leaders create clarity for people and room for teams to thrive.

Paula Leach has spent over 25 years in executive HR roles, most notably as the Chief People Officer at the UK Home Office and in senior roles at Ford Motor Company. She is also the author of Vantage Point: How to Create Culture Where Employees Thrive.

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Episode Highlights

2:19 Main responsibilities of leaders

6:11 Getting out of the way of the team

8:15 Being versus doing, as it relates to leadership

13:09 Five leader vantage points and their benefits

19:42 Is it enough to play to one's strengths with vantage points?

23:04 Building agility to move between vantage points

25:40 Using different vantage points to create clarity and direction

29:46 Planning for the future: beyond resourcing

35:29 How to think about strategically about realizing a team vision

40:44 Communicating vision effectively

44:14 When it's unclear why team members don't understand the team vision

46:07 Leveraging different vantage points in the face of resistance

Paula’s view on the greatest unmet wellbeing need at work today

"...one of the most predominant things [is] workload, and the ability to enable people to prioritize and to be really clear about what they're doing, so that they feel like they're absolutely part of a shared endeavor or shared mission makes a massive difference to people. It's really difficult to create priorities if you haven't created the clarity of direction."

What “working with humans” means to Paula

“If I were to give you one word, I think it's about discovery.

If you think about it, since the Industrial Revolution, humans very much became almost like machines. Then humans became a sort of task workers, knowledge workers. And, with the advent of technology over a 200 year period, we've come full circle, and we're now in the human age of work.

We've now freed ourselves to be able to work together in a way [that uses] the capabilities that made our species so dominant in the world. And those things that have differentiated humans from other species [are] social connection, creativity, innovation, the ability to think and collaborate, invent, problem solve, be connected together, care about each other. These things are what have created our ability as humans to be such a successful species. That is now what's completely available to us again, in the world of work. But now with this sort of boost of technology that we've had building for the last 200 300 years. So, I think we've kind of come full circle. So, to me, it's about discovery and it's about leveraging those capabilities that we uniquely have.”

Resources

Follow: Paula on LinkedIn and her website

Read: Vantage Point: How to Create Culture Where Employees Thrive