Leadership: The ripple effect of your behaviour

When you're in a position of leadership, you need to be fully aware of the effect you're having on the business and the people within it.

If you so much as sneeze, everyone notices.

Literally everything you do as a leader is observed. You are setting the values, culture, behaviours and pace of the business. That's one of the reasons leadership is so challenging.

You have to be constantly aware of your strengths and weaknesses and demonstrate the behaviours you want others to follow. Otherwise, your behaviour becomes amplified and reverberates throughout the organisation.

Your actions can create a tsunami of change.

Sometimes that's positive.

Sometimes the change is completely unintentional and simply creates more problems for you to deal with later.

Think about the ripples

Be aware of what you're doing and ask yourself as often as you can:

"What kind of ripples will this create in my leadership team and throughout the business?"

One important aspect of your influence as a leader is the level of psychological safety within the organisation.

Your words and actions can easily trigger fight, flight or freeze responses.

As humans, we're naturally wired to respond to situations we perceive as threatening.

Sometimes those perceived threats are much smaller than we realise.

A personal leadership lesson

I remember once making the mistake of telling a member of my team off in front of everyone else in the department.

Without thinking, I damaged that individual's enthusiasm and changed the atmosphere across the whole team.

I'm not entirely sure what everyone else was thinking, but I imagine thoughts such as: "That could be me next" were probably running through their minds.

Fight, flight and freeze responses were almost certainly triggered to varying degrees.

Fortunately, someone pointed this out to me, and I acted quickly.

I gathered the team together and apologised to the individual because:

• It was the right thing to do.
• It helped restore the psychological safety of the workplace.

Why psychological safety matters

Feeling safe at work is more important than many leaders realise. When people don't feel psychologically safe, their attention shifts towards the source of fear.

Instead of focusing their energy on creativity, problem-solving and innovation, they begin focusing on protecting themselves.

If you become the object of fear, you're making leadership much harder for yourself while reducing the overall effectiveness of your team.

Ultimately, that affects the bottom line of the business.

Live your vision and values

One of the best ways to create positive ripples throughout an organisation is to genuinely live your vision and values.

If they're hidden away in a drawer and only brought out for marketing or PR exercises, perhaps it's time to dust them off.

Talk about them. Demonstrate them. Use them when making decisions. Encourage conversations around them.

People watch what leaders do far more closely than they listen to what leaders say.

As a leader, you're a powerful transmitter throughout your organisation. The signals you send every day shape the culture that everyone else experiences.

Choose those signals carefully.