Your key leadership challenge should be something personal and something practical to you and others – worthy of their time and support.

Key Leadership Challenge: Achieving Leadership Results

STEP 1:Identify a key leadership challenge

Your key leadership challenge should be something personal and something practical to you and others – worthy of their time and support. This challenge or issue will run as a thread throughout our program. It should be a current challenge which:

• Affects you and is of primary importance to you, your team and/or your organisation

• Is complex enough to truly challenge you to improve or grow as a leader

• Involves others who also have a significant investment or interest in the outcome

• Possibly requires change in assumptions or behaviour for those involved

• Has persisted over a period of time, or is likely to do so, and

• Is a real-world challenge you want to address within the next 90 days following the program. Some examples:

• Building acceptance for challenging revenue or performance objective(s);

• Engaging and influencing others in creating fundamental changes in how work is done and how results are achieved;

• Addressing a teamwork issue among your group;

• Leading a change initiative;

• Accomplishing objectives without formal authority, yet accountability; or

• Increasing motivation, focus, and commitment during organizational turbulence.

STEP 2: Briefly describe your leadership challenge

STEP 3:Now, re-write the challenge in the form of a question: “How might I…? or “How do I…?”For example: How might I help my direct report be more assertive? How do you solve a relationship problem within your team? How do I have a difficult conversation with a direct report about performance?

STEP 4: What has already been tried to address this issue? What has worked well? What has not worked?

STEP 5: What will you (and your organization) gain from solving this problem?

STEP 6: Imagine yourself in the future at a time when the challenge has been resolved. What will the new situation look like? What will you be thinking? How will you feel? What do you hear others saying?