The Leadership Journey Compass™

Directions of the Leadership Journey Compass™

The north and south points of the leadership compass oppose the leader and the organization. Leaders who do not first develop their own adaptiveness and agility will likely be ineffective at developing business agility and performance.

The west and east points of the leadership compass oppose beliefs and behaviors. How leaders think and what they believe impacts how they act and behave. What organizations value impacts how they deliver.

Leaders who over focus on short-term performance goals will inhibit their organizations’ ability to build capacity for sustained value delivery in the future. Most leaders (and equally agile transformation efforts) are drawn to the southeast quadrant (organization behavior), putting pressure on teams to deliver quickly. Effective leaders step back, examine the landscape, evaluate alternatives, and purposefully create opportunities to deliver value today. At the same time, they build the capacity needed to deliver value in the future.

Orientations of the Leadership Journey Compass™

The Leadership Journey Compass™ orientations provide navigational guidance to leaders to help develop their own awareness, thinking, intentions, and behaviors as well as the guidance required to develop more agile ways of working across the organization.

The top two orientations of the leadership compass focus on how the leader thinks and behaves. The lower two orientations of the leadership compass focus on developing the organization’s aligned values and customer value delivery.

Again, most leaders and organizational change efforts focus primarily toward the southeast quadrant (Value Delivery). However, agile leaders recognize that the three other orientations of the leadership compass (Growth Mindset, Catalyst Habits, and Aligned Values) are what enable organizations to sustain and grow their capacity to deliver today and in the future, so that is where they primarily focus.