A Leadership Short — Empowerment & Accountability
Navigating the maze of psychological safety, empowerment, and accountability
Fostering inclusive leadership
To steal a famous quote from one of the most inspirational leaders in history, “I have a dream.” My dream is to foster an environment for my cyber engineering leaders and staff with the following three characteristics:
- They are comfortable challenging me on anything.
- They are equally comfortable being challenged by me.
- They freely take accountability for tasking without prompting.
Six months ago, over a half-dozen engineering leaders and their staff were merged into my existing organization, and now half of my leadership team is ‘new.’
Since then, I’ve focused on fostering an inclusive leadership environment measured by the three characteristics above. But it's a process. It takes time.
A new challenge
Full disclosure… this is a new challenge for me. My leadership teams typically grow incrementally, by ones and twos.
Onboarding leaders in these cases involve different dynamics, which seems less challenging for me. But not less important.
Another challenging dynamic is that all of my new leaders worked together previously. They bring a collective history and their own set of team norms.
Bringing nearly two dozen leaders and senior cyber engineers together and creating an environment of psychological safety, empowerment, and accountability is the most challenging opportunity I’ve faced.
I’ll let you know how it goes in future posts.
