Together is how we achieve the bigger outcome
Lessons for our Better World from Aboriginal leader, Ben Bowen.
Part of an on-going series sharing keynotes and salient reflections from my conversations with leaders who are making our world better.
How do we achieve our greatest outcomes?
How do we communicate more effectively to better engage our teams?
How do we connect networks of people to leverage collective endeavours?
How do we create sustainable business models that propagate longterm success?
These are just some of the questions that I discussed with Ben Bowen in the third conversation with Better World Leaders.
“together is how we achieve the bigger outcome”
Connect with your team. Collaborate with fellow leaders. Build networks of customers, suppliers and enablers throughout your markets.
Engage your community, share with your family and bring all of yourself to everything that you do.
The key theme of my fantastic conversation with inspiring Aboriginal leader was this — in Aboriginal culture, you are never an individual. Leaders never stand alone, or even up front. You are always part of your mob, one of the tribe, connected and woven into a collective collaborative endeavour.
Many of these learnings and insights can be readily applied to organisational success.
I invite you to consider this for a few moments, and if curiosity draws you on, to explore the whole conversation with Ben (link at the end of the article).
“Everyone is a leader within their own networks”
Great leaders link networks — enabling powerful communication and momentum building.
In Ben’s words, leaders look for the ‘hand-holding’ points between these networks, no matter how small the network, linking them and enabling collaboration through communication is the key to successful leadership.
“More personal stories and less rehearsal”
We hear this a lot, that leaders need to ‘bring back’ the human aspect of their communication.
How about some lessons in how to do so from storytellers that never took it out?
Aboriginal stories have been told and re-told for generations over 10s if not 100s of 1000s of years. Over these times they have lost little of the detail, and the core messages, values and meaning of the stories reminded consistent. This is due to a complex relationship between the story-teller and the audience, so that no one has sole custodianship of the details of what is being communicated. The fine details may shift, but the overall message, the main theme and the crucial learning remains true.
Critical to this relationship is the delivery by the story teller. The more personal the telling of the story becomes, the more impactful it is. The slips and the slides of pronunciation and dictation add to the personification of the telling, and build the authenticity of the leader. More personal stories, less rehearsal.
“Aim to hit your growth target and sustain it”
If on-going, relentless exponential growth is the objective, we all have a problem.
How can we have sustainable growth, allowing people, organisations and societies to prosper, without excessive, repressive growth that strains systems and depletes resources?
Valuable lessons on this in this week’s conversation with Ben Bowen, who shares insights from Aboriginal and international indigenous cultures on growth and resources conscious development.
To summarise a few further reflections from this conversation, the key messages for me are;
– To avoid disruption and build sustainable growth, organisations should focus not on eliminating single problems but linking issues to address the larger global solution.
– Build communities within employees, consumers and customers to leverage ‘small networks’, focusing on the leaders of these and seeking to engage with collective leadership.
– Discover the power of storytelling for communication, critically how to ensure core values and organisational ethos are prominent consistently to improve reliability of messaging and knowledge transfer throughout hierarchies, geographies and languages.
– How to communicate from a human perspective, both to mitigate the risk and enable the best outcome from visual communication modes.
– That to build momentum leaders should bring together and empower teams most effectively at the beginning, end and during a change phase. If this is done correctly the steerage of direction and maintaining of pace becomes much easier.
If you’ve enjoyed this overview, you can listen or watch the conversation in full via the episode page here, as well as any of the other conversations we’ve hosted by searching Better World Leaders wherever you enjoy podcasts. Select episodes (including this one) are also features on YouTube.
