Elevate Your Leadership Signature

This transformational capacity requires an elevated ‘leadership signature’, argues MIT Sloan Executive Education professor Deborah Ancona—their own unique way of doing things, based on their strengths, weaknesses, values, and personality. By knowing and communicating their signature, the leader provides their followers with vital reassurance. A clear leadership signature defines the qualities of the person steering the ship and enables the crew to understand how they can best relate to that person, and what complementary qualities they should aim to bring.

The biggest challenge faced by organizations and their leadership today is to ‘keep up’ with the swirling winds of change that characterize the markets and industries they operate in.  The sheer volume of data—mushrooming with the proliferation of AI—demographic and labor force changes, evolving customer preferences, and environmental concerns, all exemplify the challenge. Furthermore, organizations themselves have been on a trajectory of change, from bureaucratic, top-down, hierarchical entities, they have come to embrace agile, adaptive, distributive leadership models, and to seek leadership and decision-making capability at deeper levels. In a complex environment, organizations have also moved from going it alone to seeking partnerships and working within ecosystems

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Join Deborah Ancona on MIT Sloan Executive Education’s ‘Transforming Your Leadership Strategy’ program

Dates: Sept 24-25, 2024  |  Format: In-person, 2 days + coaching

Location: Cambridge, MA

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Establishing a leadership signature and ensuring it is well understood is a powerful approach. To keep up-to-speed and deal with the multiple evolving challenges a leader faces, Ancona further recommends the importance of developing four key capabilities that support the leadership signature: sensemaking; relating; inventing; and credibility. Developing these capabilities is the focus of the MIT Sloan executive program Transforming Your Leadership Strategy, which is led by Professor Ancona.

Four key leadership capabilities

These four capabilities are important in elevating an individual leader’s signature and, in organizations characterized by a ‘distributed leadership’ model, if everyone in the team is sensemaking, relating well, and inventing they will be key to forming a strong infrastructure for innovation.

Sensemaking. To address the predominant ‘keeping up with change’ challenge, intelligible sensemaking is essential. It should be the foundation for strategic thinking, for the leader’s ability to update and implement their vision, and ultimately for the organization’s future prospects. Astute sensemaking ensures leadership adapts to the evolving business environment; for example, setting the best specific path for the organization’s appropriate use of AI—providing people with a clear explanation of the whys and wherefores of technology adoption.

Developing sensemaking involves an ongoing process of both educating yourself and vicarious learning. Tuning in to what is going on around you and learning—not so much from books and courses—as from experience, practice, and observing others. When it comes to team sensemaking, with the mass of data available to all of us, differing interpretations and directions are likely. Here the leader must set some goals and parameters. To achieve alignment and get useful ideas without chaos, sensemaking should be set within a strategic mindset.

Relating. In our post- ‘command and control’ age the ability to form trusting relationships and collaborate effectively with others, within the organization and the wider ecosystem, is a prerequisite of good leadership. Emotional intelligence and empathy are important attributes, as is the ability to recognize one’s strength and weaknesses—leaders who accept themselves as incomplete are able to compensate for their missing skills by relying on others. It is good, up to a point, to demonstrate vulnerability—as people respond well to the ‘human side’ of leaders—but best not to overdo this. Strengthening ‘relating’ as a capability is central to establishing a robust leadership signature.

Inventing. Organizations only achieve sustained success through invention, re-invention, and proactive innovation—on-the-spot innovation at all levels as much as the more formal activities reserved for the R&D department. Sensemaking should provide leaders with a vision from which to mold strategy. Delivering the vision and the strategy involves inventing new processes, new ways of working, and new products and services. In a healthy, progressive organization people at all levels will want to contribute ideas. Here as with sensemaking it is important for the leader to set parameters, and to establish fair and transparent ways to funnel ideas to filter out the best. Inventing as a leadership capability is about empowering the team and organization to innovate and invent.

Credibility. Websters dictionary describes credibility as “the quality or power of inspiring belief.” The fact that a leader can be believed or trusted underpins all their other capabilities and is clearly critical if they are to lead others. Credible, authentic leadership involves consistently acting in a real and sincere way that is true to who the leader is as a person. Self-awareness sits at the core of this capability, allied to a genuine concern for the well-being and development of others. Credibility should be the basis of every leadership signature.

Ancona’s concept of a ‘leadership signature’ is an effective new approach for leaders to prioritize and organize a growing set of critical leadership capabilities that are in increasingly high demand. Bringing together internal and external leadership qualities, from sensemaking to relating, and inventing to credibility—and cementing those into a signature leadership style that is unique to the individual leader, can equip them to deal with the great challenges facing organizations today.

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This article is based on the MIT Sloan Executive Education webinar: ‘Elevate Your Leadership Signature: Unlock the Power of the 4-CAPS+ Framework,’ with Deborah Ancona, Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, Professor of Organization Studies, and the Founder of the MIT Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management, hosted by Kristin Zecca, Director Executive Programs at MIT Sloan.