Success takes two specific talents
Leadership today demands more than performance. To stand out as a truly impactful leader in today’s workplace, you must master two distinct but complementary capabilities: the ability to get things done, and the capacity to create future leaders.
In The Ignited Leader, I explore this exact duality. These aren’t nice-to-have traits. They are what will distinguish you in a world shifting faster than most organisations can track.
The Changing Shape of Workplace Leadership
Leadership has evolved from task management to human connection. Today’s teams don’t just want managers. They want mentors, coaches, guides. And that shift demands something from you.
Gartner has identified six shifts reshaping the workplace, triggered by the pandemic and amplified by shifting needs and emerging technologies: from middle managers becoming coaches and teachers, to purpose and passion increasing workplace attractiveness beyond just pay, to AI as a teammate and digital dexterity outweighing tenure in importance.
Each of these changes means you can no longer lead by process or policy alone, or just focus on performance management. You need to lead by connection, vision, and clarity.
To thrive, you need to develop deep relationships with your team and deliver consistent outcomes. You can no longer just choose one. But how do you do it?
Getting Sh*t Done
Workplaces, organisations and personal bank balances are all rewarded through your ability to achieve value adding outcomes. By achieving outcomes, delivering on results, you produce value and that value is rewarded. You want more rewards, generate more value. That is why it is essential to have the skills to get stuff to done. Here are some tips you can use to help with that.
Execute with a focus on important, not just urgent
The first thing you need to work out if you want to know whats important, is what am I here to do? What do I, my team, and the organisation do that provides value?
If you cannot deliver, nothing else matters.
Getting things done is not about ticking boxes. It’s about:
- Knowing what matters most
- Creating value beyond expectations
- Working within your strengths
- Staying focused in a noisy world
As I write in The Ignited Leader, your success starts with understanding what your role, team, and organisation exist to achieve. Then align your actions to create value at every level. Doing the work to identify how you bring value by executing and delivering on outcomes is vital.
If you want to be seen as a future leader, and someone who has the capacities to grow future leaders, you need to become a plus-contributor.
Being a plus-contributor
Imagine this.
You’re watching a futuristic movie where everyone has a floating number above their head, visible to everyone but themselves. This number starts at 100, and when you interact with someone, if they feel you met your essential function, your number will stay at 100. If you underachieved, it would go down, and if you did more than expected of you, it would go up.
Your job is like this. Your position description defines the basic expectations of you. If you are someone who meets that basic expectation, your number hovers around the same as you start with. If you are underachieving, it goes down.
But, if you meet that basic expectation and you look for other ways, you can create value. It can go up. The people who get rewarded are the ones who have large positive numbers above their heads. If in most of your interactions and outcomes you dliver unexpected value, then you are a plus-contributor.
You make someone else in the team’s job easier, you find some inefficiencies and work out a better way, you find a way to improve the quality of the outputs, or you get good at training the new starter. The people who get paid more, promoted sooner, and get opportunities to gain experience in other roles are the people who regularly add value.
You are in this futuristic movie right now.
Everyone you interact with is assessing if you are making their lives easier or harder each time you interact. If you are a plus-contributor, you will be someone who achieves more and gets more opportunities.
Be deliberate about deep work
In today’s world, where distractions are omnipresent, and information is readily accessible, focusing intensely has become one of the most valuable skills for achieving high-quality, meaningful work. In his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport argues that success in modern life isn’t just about raw intellect or technical skills. It’s about the ability to minimise distractions and concentrate intensely on challenging tasks.
This section explores the concept of deep work, its relationship to the flow state, and how leaders can cultivate focus on boosting productivity, improving work quality and learning complex skills faster.
One of Newport’s key distinctions is the difference between shallow work and deep work:
- Shallow Work: These are low-value, logistical tasks that don’t require deep focus and are easily replicated by others; things like responding to emails, managing spreadsheets or tweaking presentations. Shallow work gives the illusion of productivity but doesn’t contribute significantly to growth or progress.
- Deep Work: These are cognitively demanding tasks performed in distraction-free concentration. Deep work pushes your cognitive abilities to their limits, fosters skill development and generates work that is unique, high quality and difficult to replicate.
Shallow work is unavoidable, but without a deliberate effort to protect time for deep work, leaders can get stuck in the shallows, drowning in busyness without achieving meaningful results. Deep work is where growth, creativity and innovation thrive.
Deep work is more than just working hard; it’s working smart, with focus and purpose. Newport identifies two critical advantages of deep work:
- Mastering Hard Things Quickly: Whether learning a new skill, developing a strategy or solving a complex problem, deep work allows you to absorb and apply knowledge faster by fully engaging your mind without distraction.
- Producing High-Quality Work, Fast: Deep work enhances your output’s quality and speed. In this state, your brain operates at its peak capacity, allowing you to achieve exceptional results in less time.
For leaders, this translates to sharper decision making, better problem solving, and the ability to create strategies or innovations that set your team apart.
Deep work often leads to what psychologists call a flow state. A mental zone where the focus becomes effortless, time seems to disappear, and you operate at your highest level of creativity and productivity.
Deep work is where innovation happens. It’s where leaders move beyond the noise of busy work and unlock the potential to create, learn and lead at their best. Paraphrasing Cal Newport, he says, ‘In a world where almost all information is readily available, IQ will not distinguish you; it is focus. Focus is the new IQ.’
Now we’ve detailed some tips for getting sh*t done, lets look at creating leaders.
Passing the Flame
A leader who helps achieve outstanding outcomes and grows the team’s leadership potential creates an engaged workforce. Gallup reported that engaged leaders create highly engaged workforces, and these workforces outperform their peers by 150%. This is for two reasons: good leaders increase engagement and reduce staff turnover, which is excellent for performance, and good leaders can unlock those minor improvements in each employee that allow them to access more of their potential.
In their ‘State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report’, consulting and research agency Gallup provided information about workplace engagement. Of note, they found a direct correlation between the worker’s engagement level and that of the manager, i.e., an engaged manager led to an engaged worker:
‘Gallup’s decades of research into effective management find that a great manager builds an ongoing relationship with an employee grounded in respect, positivity, and an understanding of the employee’s unique gifts. Great managers help employees find meaning and reward in their work. As a result, employees are interested in what they do, leading to higher productivity and enjoyment.’
A leader who invests in understanding their people, their gifts and strengths, and their aspirations and goals increases the team members’ engagement and improves their quality of life.
But there are several reasons beyond worker satisfaction to focus on.
Escaping the crush of stuff
Here’s one truth that every leader learns fast: there will always be demands on your attention. A lot of them. The problem is that you can’t improve the things that matter most when your attention is constantly being pulled in a thousand directions. There’s always something urgent, always something demanding your immediate focus. This concept is something I picked up from Ryan Hawk and call the ‘crush of stuff’. The never-ending stream of tasks and fires to put out keeps you from working on the bigger picture, like developing strategies, nurturing team growth and making meaningful changes.
You know what I mean. You plan to improve something, but first, you must answer those emails, update the tracking sheet, finalise the report, and catch up with your team. Then there’s the meeting with your boss, the performance reviews, interviews for that vacant position, organising the customer briefing pack, and approving leave requests. It goes on and on.
Before you know it, you’re buried by the crush. And the improvements you wanted to make? They’re still sitting there on your ‘would-be-nice’ list that you never get to.
Here’s where developing leaders around you comes in.
Leadership creates capacity
The key concept here is that increasing the leadership capacity around you increases your own capacity. It frees you from reacting to the day-to-day and focusing on the bigger picture. With more leadership distributed within the team, you can step back and ask, ‘Are we working on the right problems? Are our systems and processes optimised? How can we improve our interactions with other teams or stakeholders?’
You’ll never get to those bigger questions without creating that extra capacity and developing others to lead. If you stay stuck in the crush, just putting out fires, you won’t have the space to make the necessary impact.
I’ve seen leaders constantly reacting, scrambling to meet the next deadline or solve the next crisis. They never escape the crush, and because of that, they never get to the strategic work that can move the needle. But if you can grow the leadership skills of the people around you, you’ll find yourself free to step back, look ahead, and create lasting change.
The power of choice
When you grow leaders within your team, you gain more capacity, freedom and, ultimately, more choices. You can decide where to focus your time and energy. You can decide how to tackle the challenges ahead. The more often you get to choose where you’ll make your impact, the more powerful you become as a leader.
It’s not always easy, and you won’t always get to choose. But when you create the space to think and act strategically, when you step outside the crush of stuff more often, you magnify your ability to bring about the proper outcomes. That’s when you can work as the best version of yourself.
And when you’re operating as your best self, something else happens. You develop a reputation, a leadership brand.
Establishing your leadership brand
A leader can create a ‘brand’ as someone who grows future leaders. This personal brand doesn’t just benefit the people around them. It becomes a magnet for talent and opportunity, further amplifying the leader’s influence and the team’s performance.
When you build a reputation for developing others while achieving your own goals, people will start to speak positively about you even when you’re not in the room. That’s when you know your leadership brand is working for you.
For every single person you’ve ever interacted with, there is a version of you in their mind. It might be based on a quick chat in the hallway or a friendship that’s lasted decades. Every interaction with someone builds a version of you in their mind, and that’s your brand. When your name comes up in conversation, they recall that version of you, how you acted, what you said and what you stood for.
The more consistent those versions of you are in other people’s minds, the stronger your brand becomes.
There are three main benefits to driving convergence in your brand:
- Speaking your future into existence. People who know and trust you will listen when you talk about your goals. If you consistently show up as someone who brings value, people will support your vision and help you get where you want to be. The community around you will start to see your potential and help you make it a reality.
- Advocacy. A strong, consistent personal brand means people will advocate for you when you’re not around. Your network will open doors for you that you didn’t even know existed. Someone might say, ‘I know exactly who would be perfect for this’, and suddenly, an opportunity you never imagined lands in your lap. People trust you because your brand aligns with what they know about you, and they’ll speak for you without hesitation.
- Power. When you have a clear, consistent brand, you carry influence even when absent. People know who you are, what you stand for, and how you can add value. This gives you power, not the manipulative kind, but the power to focus on the bigger picture, to lead with integrity and purpose. You don’t have to posture or scramble for influence; your brand gives you that power.
Remember, when you build a strong brand as a leader, it not only benefits you, it creates a ripple effect. Your team starts to reflect those same values, driving them to be more effective and capable leaders themselves. And that’s when you ignite something brilliant.
Second and third-order effects
Lastly, a key benefit of working towards being an Ignited Leader is that if you give of yourself and unlock the potential in others, helping create future leaders, they can do the same for those they interact with. You can make a cascading growth in leadership within the team and organisation. You create a leader within your team, and they also create leaders. Your reach has been magnified, and the potential of each person being realised has increased.
Imagine you help create a leader at work, giving them the tools to be effective there. Then, they start acting as a leader in their community, using the skills and mindset they have helped shape to improve the lives of people they reach more widely. You have started to impact not only your and their success at work, but you are positively impacting the world at large. When the metric of the number of future leaders becomes essential, you can start to get exponential growth in leadership and realised potential.
Wrapping It Up
To be truly successful with leadership into the future, you need two flames:
- The drive to deliver real value through results and outcomes
- The desire to grow real people and their leadership capacities
If you want to distinguish yourself as a leader, it’s time to master both.
Execution earns the right to lead.
Development earns the right to stay.
Build a leadership style that performs and empowers.
This post has captured two snippets of the new book The Ignited Leader, which uses real stories, straight-talking information, and actionable tips for improving. If you want to learn more, visit leonpurton.com and explore Ignited Leadership. There is a free IGNITED leader self-assessment available as well.
Ignited Leadership can help you be a better leader, achieve more, and grow the capacities of future leaders. As Ryan Hawk said;
“Buy this book. Read it. Implement it. It could change your life”
