February 2024 Issue Real-Time Leadership - A Book Review

Leaders today are expected to navigate high-risk and pressure situations at great speed, often with no shelter in terms of manuals or maps. In such moments, they tend to act on reflexes driven by personal fears or ambitions. It leads to them missing the point and making expensive mistakes. Real-Time Leadership offers practical frameworks and tools to read high-pressure situations accurately and display extraordinary leadership at such moments. The leader’s transformation is a necessary foundation for driving organisational transformation. When leaders accept and work with their dark side, they can understand and channel their shortcomings in positive directions. The task is to widen the leadership range to 10X, not just for business but also for their personal development.

The book Real-Time Leadership is relevant to leaders, CEOs, boards, leadership educators and coaches. It draws on decades of research, expertise and experience that the authors David Noble and Carol Kauffman have from their work as executive coaches and advisors to some of the world’s most successful CEOs and leadership teams. Carol has over 40,000 hours of experience coaching leaders, is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, a psychologist by training and the founder of the Institute of Coaching (affiliated with Harvard Medical School). David Noble is a coach and strategist. He led a significant part of his career as a practising executive and CEO before being on the Exco of two global strategy consultancies. David and Carol have been business partners in their coaching and advisory works for nearly a decade. They are both recognised by Thinkers 50 as the world’s top coaches. They invented the “two-on-one “coaching method, drawing on their complementary strengths and approaches to coaching CEOs and leaders facing complex and seemingly impossible problems. The book explores leadership systemically and inspires you with ideas to perform at peak levels when the stakes are high.

One of the outstanding frames in this book is the three dimensions of leadership. The framework helps you shape your leadership style to be more holistic. To excel as a leader, you need to pay constant attention to all three dimensions:

1. Outer – The forces and drivers for success in your role outside of you that include goals, markets, customers, competition, colleagues and more.
2. Inner – Your attitudes, aspirations, beliefs, values, emotions and character strengths
3. Interpersonal – How you relate to others and achieve together, your capacity to inspire, connect and grow others in a way that unlocks their potential.

Reflection on these three dimensions will help you see how imbalances in these dimensions can contribute to under-performance.

A central and Swiss army knife-like concept is the MOVE Framework. This framework helps leaders pull back, reflect and navigate stormy business situations. The book has several examples and evidence from real-life coaching cases of how CEOs applied this framework. This framework helped them make the right moves in challenging situations with no lifelines.

MOVE is an acronym that I will elaborate on here for you.

M – Being mindfully alert like an athlete to the three dimensions of leadership in challenging situations. Rising beyond the reactive choices and being more intentional and flexible in how you respond

O – Generating at least four options or ways to move before you move ahead forces more divergent thinking and going beyond reactive thinking

V – Validating your vantage point emphasizes seeing reality naked of any distortions. Our thinking, influenced by our fears and ambitions, can be dangerous and limiting. When you weigh in on your options, you increase the chances of success significantly.

E – Engaging and effecting change is essential to scaling ideas that often reside only in the leader’s head. It is about socializing and materializing change through the team and sending the right signals to the organization internally and externally.   

I recently introduced the MOVE framework in a masterclass on resilience that I was conducting for a group of CEOs. It led to fascinating exchanges that validated the usefulness and value of this framework. It triggered self-awareness to reflect on their styles and their tendency to be driven by reflexes. MOVE can be a useful Swiss army knife-like tool that leaders can use in high-pressure situations.

Beyond leaders, coaches too would find this book to be world-class material that gives them insights into how Carol and David coach CEOs in high-pressure situations by applying these concepts and frameworks. Their anecdotes expose you to a breadth of practices and ideas that are pragmatic and relevant to coaching leaders and CEOs. It resources you to apply mindfulness tangibly in your coaching work with clients. The tools are designed and presented in a modular format, allowing you to choose either parts or the whole framework based on what unfolds in a session.

I enjoyed the read and found it relevant to the topics my clients bring into coaching sessions. While we all have read and heard several theories on leadership, addressing the ‘how’ element of leadership in a crisis makes this book valuable. The backing of research and several examples of application by Carol and David lend it credibility. I further experimented with my learning in leadership development workshop settings and coaching sessions with leaders and CEOs with encouraging results. While mastering these concepts will be a longer journey, practising them will give you clarity and confidence at each step towards your destination. This book is a wholesome resource for helping those facing change and adversity in real time. 

 And I would like to close with a quote from the book -

"All of this is a tall order, but the goal is transcendence - of ego, emotion, and impulse when under stress or attack. Transcendence means you rise above the fray, and after giving your all, be able to feel equanimity no matter what happens to you and what the outcomes of your effort might be."