The best leaders find insights and inspiration from outside their company, industry, and experiences. They actively seek out fresh perspectives to further develop their vision. They are intelligent enough to understand that inspiration can come from outside the walls of their company and will actively seek techniques from seemingly unrelated industries.
Leaders can gain significant value when taking inspiration from others whose experiences differ from their own. It can help them identify tools or techniques that haven’t yet been explored within their company. They can find solutions without any reservations, when seeking advice and inspiration from outside of their organization too.
Here are some ideas for gaining an outside perspective.
Ways in which leaders can gain fresh perspectives
As the leader of an organization, it is important to gain fresh perspective on the big issues that allow you to grow and transform your organization instead of simply keep it running. Here are some general ways in which you can build fresh executive perspective:
- Attend industry conferences where you may be able to listen to and connect with keynote speakers and experts within your industry.
- Invest in your own learning through seminars about leadership and executive coaching.
- Develop the habit of taking time to listen to people in your organization whose outlooks and areas of expertise differ from your own.
- Build a great executive team of people whose expertise or skills differ from your own.
- Look for experiences in other industries that can help you shape your organization’s innovation. This will help with best practices in other companies from within your industry too.
- Read industry publications and books that keep you in the loop of important trends and technologies.
- Network and talk to senior executives at other companies, also known as external executive peers. These peers may face similar challenges to you, where you can find a solution together in a 1 on 1 exchange.
- Communicate with your customers, both established and new, to understand their needs.
- Keep the lines of communication open with former colleagues and peers, even those who have left your organization, if appropriate.
Next, we look at a few points in more detail that will help leaders adopt and engage with fresh perspectives to lead effectively.
Keep an open and inquisitive mind
Even if you have been working for the same organization for many years, it’s a good idea to explore why certain things are designed a certain way and how processes can be streamlined, modified, or abandoned. Oftentimes, an organization can become stuck in their old ways, simply because it’s comfortable. It is important, however, to keep in mind that there will always be better and more efficient ways to complete the same tasks that can create a more productive and forward-thinking organization.
Great design, fascinating processes, and innovation are all around us. Something as simple as an interesting customer experience at your favorite restaurant could provide inspiration for work related movements, such as training your employees to creating a narrative that helps sell your next internal initiative.
You might consider some of the following: How are people communicating? What technologies are being adopted to help make things easier? How are employees interacting with their customers? You’ll suddenly find that there’s inspiration all around you.
Follow aspirational companies and industries
Instead of looking exclusively to industry peers or your customer base for insight, seek out a few companies or industries that have experiences and capabilities that you’d like to develop. For example, many companies have recently started concentrating on customer experience and have taken inspiration from the retail industry.
LeaderBridge is a tech platform which allows you to connect with peers from other companies and industries. It is a platform specifically for executive leaders from any industry to ask questions, answer questions and gain fresh perspective from outside of your organization, all in an anonymous and safe way.
Ask better questions
As leaders, we often assume that our job is to have all the answers. Leaders are the people that are supposedly full of wisdom. They make all the decisions, provide guidance and direction, and are readily available to answer the toughest internal questions.
As leaders, however, we must embrace that there is no shame in asking questions. The fast pace at which business is changing means that we as leaders cannot have all the wisdom for every discipline required to compete in today’s market. A lower-level employee may hold more knowledge in their specific field, which can push the collective vision forward. It is the responsibility of the leader to provide an environment where employees feel their can contribute their ideas and expertise.
The sort of questions leaders ought to ask are those that encourage people to come together to explore new opportunities for your organization. Here are some examples:
- What can we learn from our competitors to create more value than what we have delivered in the past?
- How can we deliver on the emerging and unmet needs of our customers?
- How can our organization move from standardized, mass-market products or services to personalizing the product/service to meet the needs of our clients?
- How could we employ sensor technology to create more visibility into our customers buying journey?
By asking these questions, we are gaining fresh perspectives. This is useful for two reasons. First, it allows you to call on specific individuals from specific industries or regions when you need expertise in a particular area. Second, it can help identify areas where your organization could improve.
Find external peers to support you
Focusing only on your industry can be comfortable. Speaking to the peers in your own organization is the norm. You speak the same language, have the same concerns, and often move at a similar pace. The problem is; however, leaders cannot gain a true new perspective from the same people within their organization. Sometimes, as a leader, you need a safe space to express yourself without the limitations of what internal peers might think.
At first, seeking advice from external peers may seem uncomfortable. Where can leaders go to find such external peers? This might be the first question that comes to mind.
Finding like-minded peers needn’t be a challenge with LeaderBridge.
LeaderBridge is a Q&A matching platform that allows leaders from all around the world to come together in an anonymous setting to offer and gain peer support and share fresh perspectives. You can connect with other leaders by asking a question that goes out to all members (not including members of your own organization). Alternatively, you can narrow the pool of recipients down to only those who meet your criteria in terms of their main subject areas of interest, position title, size of company, region, gender, and other attributes. You can also choose to connect with individuals by stating a topic of discussion rather than asking a specific question.
Actively seeking support from individuals who think differently than you can bring fresh energy to the problems you’re facing as a leader. This applies to product offerings, product design, company functions and operations, and other aspects involved in decision making.
Join LeaderBridge today by visiting our registration page here.
