Before you go too far establishing a strategy to achieve your leadership purpose, make sure you really understand the arena in which you are about to a successful leader. Arena, as a word, has been used deliberately in the book, Influential Leadership, to cater for the diverse nature of the environments where leaders need to become more influential. For some, it will apply to companies or organisations while for others it may be more appropriate to think of industries, populations or even social settings.
Regardless of the type of arena you are focusing on becoming more influential within, you need to get to grips with its structure. The best way of doing this at first is to identify all of the groups which are involved in and around your arena.
Consider a group to be …
“A collection of individuals who are bound together by a common feature, interest or objective.”
In commercial organisations, groups include teams, divisions, functional disciplines, professions, companies and so on. In more social arenas, you may have clubs, sporting interests, old schools, residential areas or even people who just enjoy each other’s company.
Your challenge now is to identify as many groups as possible which exist within your arena. They will vary in their impact and influence; however, we will get to that in another article. For now, try to create the group structure of your arena.
Look for patterns too. Most groups have sub-groups and will also be a member of a larger group. You might like to depict these as concentric circles in your notebook. If you do, that will be the neatest it gets on this topic because many groups will be a sub-group of several other groups. For example, an HR team may report into the local business unit, and the global shared service for HR — matrix reporting is now the norm. Equally, IT may report to the CFO but will also be a member of their professional body. These multiple memberships can easily create divided loyalties.
Another factor to bear in mind is that each individual within a group is going to be a member of many different groups. Again, the potential for divided loyalties arises and becomes, perhaps, a little more pronounced. That is a deviation into the politics which needs to be left for another article.
For the time being, invest some time in giving shape to your environment by mapping it out, or at least, identifying all the different groups which reside there. In the next article, I’ll take you through a little process to help you to understand a little more about the influences at work within your leadership arena.
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