What are the traits of a successful leadership team in Private Equity backed businesses? The four key behaviours of leaders, the importance of curiosity, team dynamics, leadership insights, leadership and growth mindset.
On the More2 Industry Leaders podcast, Samuel Robberts, Chief Product Officer of Leadership Dynamics at Drax Executive, addresses the similar traits of strong corporate leaders and leadership teams. Samuel joins Sorcha O'Boyle to discuss how his recent studies show that the best-performing organisations are more inclined to make leadership changes if they have a framework of behaviours usually found in the most successful high-growth companies. In this episode, Sorcha explores how natural curiosity is one of the important characteristics needed in leadership change and Samuel gives an intriguing viewpoint based on his findings. Samuel’s work with Leadership Dynamics focuses on assisting private-equity-backed business leaders and teams in maximising their strengths, minimising their shortcomings, and achieving their strategic goals.
Samuel Robberts: “What our research shows is that it's all about the balance and complementarity of the team coming together and driving that effectively, so they can come together to focus on that value creation. That is ultimately what the leadership team is there to provide, and we're clear and our research is clear, that it's the leadership team that is the lever for successful value creation in businesses.”
Sorcha O’Boyle: So if you have a CEO who is quite aware that they are very curious for example, and they're very agile, let's say for arguments sake and perhaps those traits are slightly dominating the leadership team in a negative way. Say they're jumping around, and they've loads of greats ideas but they don't execute anything and nothing actually gets done. How can the leader of the team manage that behaviour and foster an environment in which maybe they themselves aren't particularly comfortable, or experienced or don't like it that much?
Samuel Robberts: I think one big thing there is, so one of the traits that we measure in PACE is agility and part of agility is a growth mindset, a willingness to learn from another environment and often actually the mere fact that you're willing to moderate and change your behaviour and drive those things, and that the rest of the team are willing to as well, can be indicated through what we would call that agility score where you are willing to and open to developing how you go about things. Whereas if you have a fixed mindset, a very what we call mastery, so have a clear method and means, then you're much less likely to be open and curious about other things that are out there and potential.
Listen to the full episode here to get the full story:
