WHAT IS B.R.A.V.E LEADERSHIP?
My friend Dr. Jonathan Ashong-Lamptey wrote a lovely post about me on Linkedin, amplifying my work around inclusive leadership. It was a great reminder for me that I need to have a post up about what BRAVE Leadership is and why it is so important to me.
This will be the first of five posts I do to break down what it is all about.
Having attended, spoken at and facilitated many leadership courses over the years, from student leadership to teachers to corporate and non-profit cohorts, I realised something was missing from all of them - Inclusion. There was no component to ensure people were included, not marginalised due to leadership.
I have often wondered how organisations provide a fair and complete service to their customers, staff and other stakeholders if they are not seriously centring their experiences.
And so, I looked at all these similar modules around performance management, effective communication, influence and inspiration, strategic thinking, decision-making and problem-solving and wondered how I could coach those I work with, to do all these things but with a mindset of inclusion.
The BRAVE Model™
The result of this musing is the creation of The BRAVE Model™. A play on the verb brave, as for many doing this in the face of traditional leadership approaches would be an act of courage, but also an acronym for Bold, Resilient, Agile, Visionary and Ethical Leadership.
I wanted those I worked with and those influenced by my work to think about how Bold they could be. How do they make such choices or decisions in workplaces where traditionally, inclusion was ignored? Bold forces your hand to make those human choices without losing any commercial integrity.
Asking leaders to be Resilient is no easy task. For me, the process starts with seeing resilience, or the ability to bounce back from difficult situations, as something embedded into your cultural DNA. Whether that is of your team or your organisation, this would mean understanding how your leadership impacts others and gaining insight on how to improve it.
Being Agile speaks to leaders who can respond effectively to change. These are leaders who don’t automatically steer towards long bureaucratic processes or who can challenge groupthink around decisions. They can be flexible enough to adapt to a climate that demands clearheaded thinking on changes in technology, the economy, staffing, or other externalities.
Visionary leadership is about being able to take bold leaps. Setting your sights on where you want to take your people with a clear and measurable means of getting there. The key is how you get people on board to realise that vision. You can’t please everyone, but that clarity of purpose builds trust and also alerts you to those who are willing to go on that journey with you.
The final pillar is Ethical leadership. I don’t believe you can teach ethics, but you can model it - centring fairness, justice, trust and honesty and making those behaviours and values sustainable. Many ways of working across public and private sectors may seem to make this a pipe dream, but I found through coaching and facilitation that it wasn’t that hard to do once there was a commitment to making ethical leadership really happen.
The BRAVE Leader And so, my coaching practice has primarily been about how I can embed inclusion into many of the strategic decisions and challenges facing the 21st-century leader. My team and I mainly focus on four areas:
Executive Coaching
Senior Management Coaching
Mentor Coaching
Board Coaching.
I will break those down over the next four articles. I will also cover how we use tools to map the BRAVE Organisation, develop BRAVE Cultures and hold BRAVE Conversations, among others.
It is important to note here that BRAVE Leadership doesn’t only happen at a senior level. Inclusive leadership can be demonstrated and adopted at any level across an organisation. So It is not about a singular leadership voice but rather the expectations of leadership across an organisation.
I hope this helps to explain why I bang on about it so much - and why it matters.
