My Top 5 Leadership Lessons: Charles Brook

In this series we have been talking to some of our Partners who have been sharing their Top 5 Leadership Lessons. In this blog, Charles Brook, the founder of TPC Leadership shares his.

It’s very easy when you have leadership responsibilities to just be in the ‘doing’ mode. How many of us take time to step back into a creative space, to really look at what the future could look like and create a vision to work towards? In my opinion, that’s where creativity comes into a leadership role. It’s about envisaging the future, you can then focus your energy and the energies of the people around you to move towards that vision, add value and make a difference along the way.

It’s important to evolve your leadership as it’s a real danger if a leader stays static. For example, when you’re leading new teams, initially you may have to manage them more closely to make sure they’re delivering the detail and data required. As people develop, your leadership style needs to adapt. If not, all you’re doing is disempowering those around you and stopping them from developing their own personal leadership. The way you operate with people is always shifting as you grow into leadership itself.

I strongly believe that as a leader you have to demonstrate that when you’re not working, you’re not working and that when you are on holiday you’re on holiday and that you have a life outside of work.When leaders do not do this, everyone thinks they should work like that, so if you’re working at 10pm every night you can bet other people feel that to succeed in the organisation they have to do the same. I think role modelling the whole life, not just work life is really important for sustainability for you and your organisation.

Embracing diversity in its many forms as a leader is really important because most of us find it easier to work with people that are most like ourselves, the challenge is that you land up in group think. If you can encourage diversity of thought, ways of doing things and diversity of people and then find ways to leverage that, I think you get a much better outcome. It’s not an easy task to do because working with diversity means you must flex more as a leader. You can’t just be yourself and expect everyone else to configure around you. Being flexible in your leadership style so you can embrace diversity in your leadership is very important.

To be successful as a leader it’s about encouraging quality thinking, quality planning and quality execution. One of those three things is nearly always missing when a leader is not as successful as they could be. It is important to hold space for these discussions and inspire your people to take ownership and place a high value on how these activities can bring growth to the organisation.

Have a leadership challenge? Feel free to contact us, to see how we can support.