“As a co-Founder and Chief Executive, I've experienced many shifts since my executive team and I started working on this.”
“This process has helped me become more self aware, more ambitious in my strategic goals, and more planned and purposeful.” - CHRO
“I'd definitely recommend the Xquadrant approach to anyone who wants to focus on bigger, more strategic issues and have a bigger impact in their role.” - Group CEO
If you’re like many skilled and successful leaders, you’re working hard, putting in a lot of effort, and driving your organisation forward.
You're a Founder, CEO, or other senior executive. People are impressed: you’re clearly a high performer and have achieved way more than most.
But inside, you know you’re still just scratching the surface of your potential. You might even feel you’ve hit a plateau. Regardless, you’re still hungry for more impact and you’re ready to play a bigger game.
If this is you, then you’re in the right place.
More...
A new way of thinking
Welcome to this foundational series called Exponential Leadership Principles. The ideas and insights in this series underpin everything we do at Xquadrant, and I’m keen to share them with you.
You’re going on a journey - entering a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about being a leader and creating extraordinary impact. I’m going to share some of my highest leverage thinking with you, developed over nearly three decades of advising some of the world’s top C-Suite leaders.
You’re either going to deeply resonate with these ideas, or you’ll rapidly feel a need to get back to the comfortable world of day-by-day progress that you’re familiar with.
Either outcome is a certainty - there’s no middle ground.
I hope you choose to stay, as I’ve seen these principles work their magic time and time again. Our monthly email newsletter, the Xquadrant Insider, explores these topics in more depth - and this series is the essential orientation.
Let’s start with a broad overview of what you can expect as I unpack what I call Exponential Leadership. This is a principles-based framework that will give you a new lens to understand how you can create impact and results that you’ve barely dreamed of until now.
Incremental vs. Exponential leadership
“When you’re on an exponential curve, when you look backwards it seems horizontal and when you look ahead it seems vertical.”
Successful leaders already know how to drive results, personally and through their team or organisation. They’re strong problem solvers, very goal-orientated, and they get things done fast. They’re safe pairs of hands, and they know how to add a lot of value.
But they’re also so competent that they’re probably a bottleneck in their organisation, and they’re overloaded as a result. They have an extraordinary capacity to get things done, but this very strength becomes a weakness as so many people demand their time.
What’s more, they have to do it all again next quarter. They’re delivering solid but incremental progress, and it’s keeping them from making the strategic moves that create extraordinary exponential results.
It’s incremental leadership and conventional success:
On the other hand… there’s exponential leadership and exponential success:
Exponential leaders build momentum. You create ever-increasing capacity and capability in yourself and in your organisation so that results compound upon each other and you create exponentially great outcomes.
This is a skill set that most leaders simply have not acquired. For example, it’s one thing to climb the mountain of leadership and high-performance; it’s another to take other people up that mountain, and it’s quite another to develop leaders who themselves multiply and grow more leaders.
“When you’re on an exponential curve, when you look backwards it seems horizontal and when you look ahead it seems vertical.”
How do we start multiplying our impact?
The question we start with is: How do we make this shift from leaders who “add value” to people who continually “multiply value”?
Well, I’ve worked with leaders of all sorts - CEOs of billion-dollar companies and founders of hyper growth tech firms - to make this leap, and there’s almost always a mindset challenge, a behaviour challenge and a leadership challenge. We’ll get those as we get stuck in to these series.
This series will present you with ideas that have the potential to transform your leadership. One or two insights can change everything.
You might even want to re-read this series. You’ll probably find fresh insights hiding in the shadows that you previously missed, because you weren’t ready to find it.
Enjoy!
Your attention is the only currency I require. There’s nothing to buy at the end of this series. One of my core values is “relationships first.”
The next step is for you to take.
If you want to come on this 7-email journey into what we call Exponential Leadership, click the red button below, then enter your best email address.
