Transformational Leadership Styles

SMART goals are dumb. Definitely outdated. They were literally coined in 1981 by John T. Doran in the Management Review. That's 43 years old. Oh and psst - your team hates setting them. Why? Because the acronym is fundamentally flawed: Specific: Limits creativity and hampers your ability to adapt when new information emerges. 🤔 Measurable: Sure, you know when you've achieved it, but does it drive meaningful, impactful outcomes? 📉 Attainable: Keeps you comfortably within your comfort zone—hardly a place for growth. 🛋️ Realistic: Another word for attainable. It encourages small thinking and boxes you in. 🚫 Time-bound: While deadlines are important, meaningful goals need built-in milestones that keep motivation high and the dopamine flowing. 🎯 In short, SMART goals keep us stuck in mediocrity, lacking purpose and innovation. So, what’s the alternative? Enter the PIC Framework: Purpose-Driven: Every goal should connect to a deeper mission or value. This alignment not only motivates but also gives each goal a clear "why." 🎯 Impactful: Goals should aim for outcomes that matter—shifting the focus from what's easily measurable to what's truly transformative. 🌍 Challenging: If your goals don’t make you a little uncomfortable, you’re not aiming high enough. Embrace the discomfort as a sign of growth and ambition.💪 Want to innovate your goal setting? Here's how you can bring PIC to your organization: Start with Purpose ➡ Align goals with the organization's mission. 🌟 Define Impact ➡ Focus on meaningful outcomes that drive the business forward over easy measurements (especially, for the sake of a great dashboard). 📊 Set Challenging Objectives ➡ Encourage ambition and innovation - yep, even if it scares you. 🚀 Embed Milestones ➡ Keep motivation high with regular wins - not just a potential bonus at the end of the year. 🏆 Foster Reflection ➡ Regularly review and adapt goals as needed. 🔄 (In other words, setting a goal in January and refusing to change it because you set it, even though you have new information, is well...ridiculous.) By moving from SMART to PIC, you create a culture of purpose, impact, and challenge. And who knows - maybe people will finally start to buy-in to the goal setting process and actually like it! 🌟 #Leadership #Innovation #GoalSetting #BusinessGrowth #PurposeDriven

The most dangerous person in a Customer Success org is the "Hero." Early in my career, I wanted to be the hero. I thought saving a churn-threatened account at 11:00 PM on a Friday was the ultimate sign of leadership. It wasn't. It was a sign of a broken process. Now, as a CSM at Cloudflare managing mid-market accounts with enterprise complexity, I’ve realized that "Heroics" are actually a form of operational debt. When you rely on heroes: • Results are tied to individuals not thecompany. • Your best people burn out. • The "fix" is never documented or repeatable. Executive-minded leadership is about moving from Heroics to Health. Heroics look like: • Manual workarounds to fix a product gap. • Last-minute "save" calls with executives. • CSMs knowing more than the CRM does. Operational Health looks like: • Playbooks that trigger before red flag rise. • Data that predicts friction points 6 months out. • A repeatable rhythm that makes the renewal feel inevitable. My TORCHED framework (Trust, Ownership, Responsibility, Credibility, Honesty, Empathy, Discipline) demands Discipline. And discipline means trusting the process enough to stop acting like a firefighter. Real growth doesn't come from the fire you put out today. It comes from the system you build to make sure the fire never starts. What’s one part of your process that still relies too much on "heroics" and not enough on a system?

Insecure leaders build loyalists, whereas visionary leaders build challengers. The difference determines whether organisations thrive or merely survive. Loyalists tell you what you want to hear. Challengers tell you what you need to know. A CEO once surrounded himself with people who competed for his approval rather than competed for better outcomes. - When the market shifted, nobody warned him.  - When competitors innovated, nobody challenged his response.  - When customers complained, nobody questioned his strategy. His team was too busy being loyal to be useful. Meanwhile, the companies that dominated during that same period? Their leadership meetings looked like intellectual battlegrounds. Those leaders didn't want cheerleaders. They wanted intelligent opposition. The best leaders I know actively recruit their own critics, whereas insecure leadership creates three toxic patterns: ➡️ The echo chamber effect: Only hiring people who think like you, ensuring blind spots become company-wide vulnerabilities. ➡️ The approval addiction: Making decisions based on internal consensus rather than external reality. ➡️ The challenge penalty: Punishing dissent so effectively that people stop offering it, even when the company desperately needs it. Visionary leadership does the opposite: ✅ Cognitive diversity: Deliberately building teams with different perspectives, experiences, and thinking styles. ✅ Constructive conflict: Creating systems where disagreement is expected, respected, and rewarded. ✅ Intellectual humility: Leading with the assumption that the best idea might come from anyone, anywhere, at any time. The leaders who build challengers? Their people stick around through the tough times because they know their voice matters, their thinking is valued, and their contributions shape outcomes. They don't just work for the leader. They work with the leader. After four decades, I've learned this: The most successful leaders aren't the ones who eliminate opposition. They're the ones who elevate it. ✅ Your next hire should scare you a little.  ✅ Your next meeting should challenge you completely.  ✅ Your next decision should survive the toughest questions your team can ask. Because in business, like in life, the people who make you comfortable are rarely the ones who make you better. #consciousleadership #betheexample

The last time one person saved our project by working all weekend, I stopped celebrating and instead asked myself, “why?” I’ve often seen a certain kind of delivery team that gets celebrated a lot, but for the wrong reasons. They move fast, they work late, and when projects start to derail, they always seem to find a way to pull it back together. You’ll hear words like “dedicated,” “scrappy,” or “all in.” But behind that praise, there’s often something more dangerous at play that we don’t talk about enough in PS and onboarding teams: Hero culture. Hero culture emerges when your delivery model relies too heavily on individual effort instead of institutional process. When a project goes off track, it’s not the system that fixes it; it’s that one rockstar Implementation Manager, or the team lead who worked through the weekend, or the project manager who jumped into 10 extra calls to keep things from slipping. And while those people deserve recognition, the pattern is a red flag. Because if your best people are regularly stepping in to patch gaps, you’re not running a high-performing system. You’re actually running a fragile one that happens to be propped up by over-functioning individuals. At Rocketlane, we’re working hard to design a delivery model where excellence doesn’t depend on any single person’s heroics. That means: - Codified processes that are easy for new team members to follow - Internal knowledge sharing that reduces risk and increases ramp speed - Handoff rituals that ensure no one is left picking up the pieces mid-project - Visibility tools that give leaders early signals instead of late-stage escalations And most importantly, it means protecting your top performers from burnout so they can elevate others, not just rescue projects. When your systems are strong, your team doesn’t have to be superhuman. They just have to show up, follow the process, and do what they do best. Heroism should be the exception, not the default operating model. I hope we get there for ourselves, and also help our customers do the same.

Last week, I was invited to speak with a group of young managers and emerging leaders. The conversation was wide-ranging: leadership, coaching, current challenges, and what’s ahead. They came with lots of curiosity, openness, and stimulating questions that mattered a lot to them. At one point, someone asked: “What’s actually in the toolbox of a great coach?” What do you need to know, and how do you need to work to genuinely support others? I shared this: It starts with you (the “armchair”) If you’re not comfortable with yourself, you can’t be present with someone else. You need to be able to settle. To quiet the noise inside. Coaching begins with being fully available in the moment, without trying to impress or fix or steer. Then: listening. Real listening (the “stethoscope”) Not reacting. Not preparing your next question. Active listening means listening for their truth. Not your version of it. And being okay with the silence in between. And from that space, you ask open questions (the “wonder questions”) Not to lead, but to unlock. Questions like: What’s on your mind? What part of this feels most unresolved? What would progress look like for you? Not for the organization, but for you? These questions don’t direct. They expand. We also talked about reframing and the ability to change perspective (the “mirror”) Someone may come in saying, “I’ve failed. This project fell apart.” And through the process, they come to see, “I challenged the status quo, and now I see what needs to change.” Reframing means looking again, differently, until new meaning, and often new energy, appears. Then came the conversation about goals (the “bow and arrow”) Coaching should have a goal. But it’s not the coach’s goal. It’s the coachee’s. And it’s not about ticking boxes. It’s about growth and transformation. The coach doesn’t lead that journey. They walk beside it. You hold the process, not the answers. You stay in service of their direction. And underneath all of this: self-awareness (the “enlightened mind”) Not as a nice to have. As a discipline. You should be aware of your own biases and your blind spots. You need to learn how to empty yourself, so you don’t bring your own values or assumptions into the space. Your work isn’t to shape the coachee in your image. It’s to create space for them to discover who they want to become. On their terms. That was the conversation. It left me quietly optimistic, because what they were asking wasn’t just about tools. It was about responsibility. About how we show up and help others to leverage their potential. What do you think? *********************** If you want to learn more about coaching, feel free to reach out on Linkedin or via my website. I´m an executive coach, consultant, and advisor to senior leaders and entrepreneurs worldwide. A former leader at Amazon, L’Oréal, Chewy, and executive board member at Tchibo. #coach #coaching #growth #personaldevelopment #team #fulfillment #leader #leadership

Yesterday I took the entire revenue team (sales, cs, marketing) off the floor for out for a very specific training. Goal Setting. Yep. The entire org for over 60 min together learning how to set and achieve goals. I do this 2x a year with my teams. Why? Because most people never accomplish their goals because they never actually set them and never actually create a plan to achieve them. I've gotten pretty dang good at setting goals. I've gotten pretty dang good at achieving goals. It makes life so much more fun. So here are the key concepts I teach in goal settting. 1. Set a goal in each of the 5 buckets. Self. Health. Wealth. Proffessional. Experience. 2. Identify the Keystone Goal - Which goal if achieved will have the biggest impact on all the rest. 3. Who do you need to BE in order to achieve this goal - How would this person act, work, communicate, behave, etc 4. What do you need to BELIEVE to achieve this goal - this combined with number 3 is where we create our affirmations. 5. Why do you want this goal - aka what will change in your world when you achieve it - If nothing changes... nothing changes. 6. What are you done dealing with now/whats the negative of NOT achieving your goal - Having a negative is important when things get hard. 7. Why you Why Now - Why are you capable of achieving this goal, what traits, resources, etc do you have that allow you to believe you can do this. 8. What are your 3x3s - 3 things daily, weekly, and monthly that if done will give you your best shot at achieving - Example - Put workout clothes out the night before with the alarm across the room - that would be a good daily for health 9. Make it visual - Vision boards (we will be doing this in a couple weeks as a team) - but also visualize it each morning, each evening, not just the accomplishing of the goal, but the process to achieve it. 10. Accountability - Share it with people that not only want to see you win, but also with people that won't allow you to lose/will hold you to the fire. --- All written out by each individual and then my challenge to them is to read it every morning and every night for 60 days. Watch what happens when you do. A team that sets goals together, wins together. I can't wait to see so many of theirs goals, so many of their affirmations, and so many of their achievements. This is going to be good ya'll. Just wait and see. PS - this is one of the most popular modules in the Sales Leadership Accelerator in fact it's unlocked right out the gate for all members. PPS - I'll be doing this workshop at Pavilion GTM in a few weeks as well here in Austin. Lets set and smash some goals ya'll!

The most expensive problems in organisations are often the ones that didn't exist until someone created them. Watching recent developments around the Iran conflict, one leadership lesson stands out. In geopolitics, as in business, there are times when leaders claim credit for solving a crisis after first framing it as an existential threat. The narrative becomes more important than the baseline reality. The solution gets celebrated, while a few ask whether the problem was as urgent, inevitable, or immediate as it was portrayed. Recent discussions around Iran's nuclear ambitions and subsequent diplomatic agreements illustrate how competing narratives can shape perceptions of both threat and success. The same phenomenon exists inside corporations. We've all seen individuals who: • Amplify manageable risks. • Create unnecessary complexity around straightforward issues. • Escalate situations that could have been resolved quietly. • Position themselves as the only people capable of fixing the resulting chaos. When the dust settles, they present the resolution as evidence of their indispensability. The organisation's owners/top leaders/promoters applauded the firefighter, but did not ask who started the fire. Great leaders measure value differently. They reward: - Problems prevented, not just problems solved. - Stability, not drama. - Systems thinking, not heroics. - Long-term resilience, not short-term optics. - Leaders who reduce organizational dependency, not those who create it. The highest-performing executives are often invisible. They build processes, align stakeholders, remove friction, and prevent crises before anyone notices. Their success rarely makes headlines because nothing explodes. A mature organisation should ask two questions whenever a 'heroic' solution is presented: - Was the problem truly unavoidable? - Did this person solve the problem, or help create the conditions for it? Sometimes the greatest contribution is not solving a crisis. It's ensuring the crisis never exists in the first place. #leadership #management #usiran Screengrab: Sky News

Ever wondered how you can transform seasoned mid-level leaders into visionary senior leaders right within your organization? Here’s a compelling case study that might inspire you to rethink your approach. Imagine leading an executive presence intervention for a top-tier manufacturing unit within a global engineering giant. With 12 leaders, each boasting over 20 years of stellar performance, the challenge was clear: ignite their passion for growth and elevate their executive presence for high-stakes meetings and CXO conversations. The goal? Beyond refining their skills, we aimed to instill the gravitas needed to drive the organization’s vision and foster authentic leadership from the inside out. Here’s what we did: 1. Crafted a Six-Month Leadership Odyssey: Dynamic group coaching sessions fostered stronger bonds and deep trusting conversations. Leaders felt safe to open up and share their vulnerabilities, creating a powerful foundation for growth. A 100-day support process bridged virtual gaps. 2. Customized Coaching: Each leader received personalized coaching, enriched by insights about Fortune 100 CXOs. We focused on Executive Presence and applied innovative communication techniques to enhance their gravitas and presence in critical meetings. The Result? These leaders didn’t just evolve—they underwent a profound transformation into change agents who propelled the organization towards sustainable change and new heights of employee and customer-centric excellence. They embraced authentic leadership, leading with confidence and authority in every high-stakes meeting. What Can You Take Away? 1. Foster Deep Trust: Create an environment where leaders can open up and share their vulnerabilities. Deep trusting conversations are essential for authentic leadership and sustainable change. 2. Enhance Executive Presence: Equip your leaders with the skills and confidence needed to handle CXO conversations and high-stakes meetings with gravitas. Tailor interventions to build their presence from the inside out. 3. Embrace Inside Out Leadership: Focus on nurturing leadership qualities from within. Authentic leadership starts with understanding oneself and extends to how leaders engage and inspire others. 4. Drive Sustainable Change: Ensure your leadership programs are designed to create lasting impact. Invest in ongoing support and personalized coaching to facilitate long-term growth and transformation. Here’s to unleashing the incredible potential within your organization! #LeadershipDevelopment #SuccessionPlanning #ExecutivePresence #AuthenticLeadership #InsideOutLeadership #CXOConversations #HighStakesMeetings #TransformationalLeadership #SustainableChange #Impact #Gravitas

One of the biggest shifts in my leadership style has been moving away from heroic problem-solving. In the early days, most of my time was spent firefighting. I loved the challenge of solving difficult problems and stepping in when things went wrong. I also found myself rewarding the same behaviour in others. The people who could jump into a crisis, work around the clock, and save the day felt indispensable. Over time, I realised that being busy and being productive are not the same thing. #leadership #thecinnamonkitchen As companies scale, heroic leadership starts to break down. Every problem solved through individual effort becomes dependent on a person. And people don't scale. Systems do. Today, I value a different kind of leadership: people who can spot a problem before it happens, put the right processes in place, and build accountability into the system. It's less visible. Less exciting. There's no adrenaline rush from saving the day. But stable, predictable systems are what allow organisations to grow without becoming dependent on heroes. The best leaders I've worked with don't solve the most problems. They create environments where fewer problems occur in the first place.

How Can You Create a Clear Vision for Leadership Development? Crafting a leadership development vision can feel like trying to piece together a puzzle while the image keeps shifting. But here’s the truth: A clear vision doesn’t just inspire—it sets a powerful foundation for growth. I’ve helped organizations define their leadership development strategies, and here’s what actually works: 1. Understand the Current Context ↳ Start with a leadership audit. ↳ Assess strengths, weaknesses, and skill gaps in your current team. ↳ Consider how business needs are evolving. 2. Define Core Leadership Values ↳ Anchor your vision in principles like integrity, innovation, and accountability. ↳ These values will guide decisions at every level. 3. Envision the Future Leader Profile ↳ What does your ideal leader look like? ↳ Outline key traits such as strategic thinking, decision-making, and team building. 4. Align with Organizational Goals ↳ Leadership development shouldn’t exist in isolation. ↳ Ensure it supports your company’s mission and long-term objectives. 5. Articulate a Compelling Vision Statement ↳ Create a simple, inspiring statement that captures your aspirations. ↳ Example: "Empowering innovative leaders to drive transformational change.” 6. Identify Development Pathways ↳ Offer tailored tracks for different career levels and aspirations. ↳ Include mentorship, training, and experiential learning opportunities. 7. Develop Measurable Metrics ↳ Define clear indicators like engagement scores, leadership assessments, and promotion rates. ↳ Track progress and celebrate milestones. 8. Communicate Effectively ↳ Share your vision broadly and often. ↳ Encourage feedback to build buy-in at all levels. What’s the impact in the big picture: A strong leadership development vision: • Drives impact by preparing leaders who can create lasting value. • Promotes diversity and inclusivity, valuing different perspectives. • Encourages continuous learning to stay ahead of challenges. • Inspires ownership, empowering leaders to take charge of their growth. Which part of this resonates most with your approach to leadership? Share your perspective in the comments—I’d love to hear your story. 👇 ♻️ Repost this to inspire your network. Follow Anand Bhaskar for more insights. —- 📌 Want to become the best LEADERSHIP version of yourself in the next 30 days? 🧑💻Book 1:1 Growth Strategy call with me: https://lnkd.in/gVjPzbcU #Leadership #Growth #Vision #Leader #Success