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Develop Your Personal Leadership Journey and Become an Effective Leader

Written by The Blue Ocean Team

Adapted from Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Leadership, Harvard Business Review (May, 2014)

Every day you are on your personal leadership journey. The decisions you make as a leader affect your team and your organization. How would you evaluate your leadership? Are you an effective leader that drives high performance and brings your people along? Or can your leadership profile be markedly improved?

What if, instead of altering who you are, you could undertake a different set of tasks and create a step-change in your leadership strength?

In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the steps you can take today to design your personal leadership journey. We will introduce you to specific tools that will help you visualize your leadership reality and ask questions to redesign your leadership profile.

At the end of the article, you will also find a presentation – an introductory guide, “ How to Become a Blue Ocean Leader “, containing tools and templates to help you take your leadership to the next level.

Your leadership journey reflection

Reflect for a moment on your personal leadership journey thus far. How effective is your leadership in your organization? Are your people engaged or disengaged? Is there a gulf between the potential and the realized talent and energy of your people at work? If so, how big do you imagine the gulf is – 10 percent, 20 percent, 40 percent of unrealized talent?

If your organization is like most, then chances are you have more disengaged employees than engaged ones.

How much better would your organization likely perform in terms of productivity, creativity, customer service, and employee happiness if you could close the gap?

Ask yourself, what is your role as a leader? If you believe your role is to drive high performance, then reflecting on your personal leadership journey and understanding how to turn this situation around is critical.

Starting with yourself is the first step to making a step change in leadership strength in your organization.

Your personal leadership journey starts today

How can you stand out as a leader? By turning disengaged employees into engaged ones through an approach to leadership that Chan Kim and Ren é e Mauborgne call ‘ blue ocean leadership ’ .

The insight for blue ocean leadership is that leadership, in essence, can be thought of as a service that people in an organization either ‘buy’ or ‘don’t buy’.

Once you start thinking about your personal leadership in this way, you can see how the concepts and frameworks developed to create new demand in the field of strategy, could be adapted to help you not only develop your personal development journey but at the same time convert your disengaged employees into engaged ones.

Focus on acts and activities

If you are ambitious to progress on your personal leadership journey, chances are you have been part of leadership development programs in the past.

Most leadership development programs and leadership strategies are designed to hone the cognitive and behavioral skills of leaders. The implicit assumption is that this will ultimately translate into high performance. Blue ocean leadership, in contrast, taps into the field of strategy by focusing on actions tied to market realities to rapidly bring about a step-change in leadership strength.

As part of leadership development programs, you have probably been called on to develop traits such as self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy, all of which require deep self-reflection and introspection to assimilate into your character or behavior (or leadership style).

Of course, having the right values, qualities, and behavior traits matters and you should work on them. However, as part of a human being’s inborn nature, these factors are hard to change within a short time frame.

Blue ocean leadership, in contrast, is action-based, just as strategy is. It focuses on what acts and activities leaders need to do to provide a leap in motivation and business results driven by people, not on whom they need to be.

It’s the difference between being asked to be motivating versus being asked to provide those you lead with real-time feedback and best practice lessons that internally motivate and guide those you lead to up their game while feeling valued.

Imagine as a leader being asked to “be motivating”. Where do you begin? Now consider a different task: to provide those you lead with real-time feedback and best-practice lessons that motivate and guide people to perform more effectively while feeling valued.

It is markedly easier to change your acts and activities than your values, qualities, or behaviors.

Tools to map out a powerful personal leadership journey

The as-is leadership canvas: how to see your current leadership reality.

Do you know how people in your organization currently experience your leadership? Are you engaging in acts and activities that hinder your team’s performance and motivation? Here is how to find out the reality of your personal leadership journey.

Blue Ocean Leadership Canvas. © Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne. All rights reserved.

The Leadership Canvas is an analytic visual that shows the acts and activities leaders currently undertake and invest their time and intelligence in as perceived by each leadership level’s customers.

Ask yourself: what acts and activities are you spending most of your time on?

The objective here is to identify the key acts and activities – both good and bad – that actually absorb your time so the As-Is Leadership Canvas can be drawn.

Start by listing your key leadership acts and activities along the horizontal axis and plotting your investment of time and effort in each activity across the vertical axis. The big picture will give you keen insight into your current leadership reality and unlock your creativity to develop a new effective leadership profile for the future.

What did you find? Is your time mostly clogged with bureaucratic tasks and low-value acts and activities? Are you spending enough time on the acts and activities that actually add value to your organization?

Here is an example of an As-Is Leadership Canvas of one company’s senior management.

© Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne. All rights reserved.

The Blue Ocean Leadership Grid: How to develop your new leadership profile

The Blue Ocean Leadership Grid is an analytic tool that complements the Leadership Canvas and helps you formulate your blue ocean leadership profile that can unlock the ocean of unrealized talent and energy in your organization.

The Blue Ocean Leadership Grid © Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne. All rights reserved.

The tool drives you to ask four questions that challenge your current leadership reality:

Eliminate : Which acts and activities you invest your time and intelligence in that should be eliminated?

Reduce : Which acts and activities you invest your time and intelligence in that should be reduced well below their current level?

Raise : Which acts and activities you invest your time and intelligence in that should be raised well above their current level?

Create : Which acts and activities should you invest your time and intelligence in that you currently don’t undertake?

The as-is leadership profiles help you wake up to reality and see the need for change.

The Blue Ocean Leadership Grid drives you to find out what leadership activities should be eliminated, reduced, raised, and created to create a step-change in your leadership strength and achieve high impact with a lower investment of time.

Based on the acts and activities from your completed Blue Ocean Leadership Grid, draw your To-Be Leadership Canvas.

The To-Be Leadership Canvas zooms in on key acts and activities that you need to cut back on to free up time and space and those you should focus on to dramatically uplift your leadership performance. By focusing on acts and activities, the tasks for change are atomized.

Compared with traditional leadership programs that often focus on attitudes and behaviors that can take years of dedicated effort to cultivate, this approach offers you a relatively straightforward way to make high-impact changes happen fast and at low cost. As Chan Kim and Ren é e Mauborgne’s research has shown, it is easier to change what you do, than who you are.

An example of a To-Be Leadership Canvas of one company’s senior management.

Your journey of leadership continues

Blue ocean leadership is about providing a structured process for you to discover for yourself how you need to change in action terms as a leader to create a win all around. The Leadership Canvas allows the standards for success to be measurable. It provides a simple one-page picture that you can quickly grasp, which shows your current or As-Is Leadership Profile and what acts and activities you need to eliminate, reduce, raise and create to deliver a leap in your leadership effectiveness for high performance.

While the practice of leadership will never be an exact science, the aim of blue ocean leadership is to help move it from soft amorphous values and traits to the acts and activities that managers can execute tomorrow and not work on for years before seeing results.

Just imagine how much higher performing your organization would be if you unlocked this blue ocean of new leadership space through action-based, market connected, distributed deep, blue ocean leadership?

Personal leadership journey presentation

This introductory guide on How to Become a Blue Ocean Leader contains key points of blue ocean leadership along with the tools and templates to help you start on your journey to design your new leadership profile.

Download this presentation and work through the exercises to design your personal leadership journey using powerful tools of blue ocean leadership.

A must-have for managers and senior leaders! Download it below. The introductory guide comes with a 5-email mini series on blue ocean leadership where we discuss the concepts further. 

How to Become a Blue Ocean Leader

Get the FREE introductory guide

Focus on your actions instead of your traits and personality to create a step-change in your leadership strength

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Leadership in Pictures

Our vision: create efficacy, everyday, in everyone., use your leadership to bring others into their zone of genius, be explicit about your culture. make it real. tend to it in everything you do - then results happen, learning to lead, in pictures.

Leadership learning can be hard work… most of the time. How often you buy a book, or download an article, thinking that this really is going to help. And then the busyness of the day, day after day, takes over and your reach the end of the year and you feel guilty that you haven’t got to them.

DON’T READ THEM. You’ve found Leadership In Pictures. This is about taking bytes of learning, five minutes at a time, to reflect, to read (or to watch the reading in a video of pictures), small bytes, often.

That’s it. No big readings, and a picture at the end to summarise it all!

Casalbordino, Chieti, Italia Al Ain, United Arab Emirates  

Contact Info

[email protected] (+971)566738968

How does it work?

What you do.

Leadership In Pictures is really led by you. What do you need? Leadership In Pictures focuses on developing your leadership, as an aspiring, middle or developing leader. We have loads of options! Join our membership and you’ll find a weekly leadership inspiration challenge. A one line reflection. With each is a blog post, that is easily listened to in 15 minutes. With each blog post is a narrated video, putting the reading into a one page, A3 summary. You can then take this to step into your weekly leadership discussions. Speak from an informed position and back it up with a summary. Everything is black and white so you can colour as you go!

Add to this, a monthly book digest. A current leadership book! Read for you, and presented in a fifteen minute summary, again with a summary and critical coaching questions to share with your team. A book read in 15 minutes on the way to work. Then unpacked in a live session once a month, and links to this via your members only Facebook group. We have 35 book reviews already at your fingertips.

Other options include, our Getting into Leadership, 12 week online course. Access to our members only areas during this time, 90 minute fortnightly live group learning sessions, with practical actions to put into practice. An analysis of your personal behaviour and leadership style, and work on how you use this to analyse and work with your team! This is limited in numbers, operating exclusive to the our course participants.

Personalised coaching sessions, Senior Leadership and Team dynamic profiles and courses are available on request. Just contact us, via our website.

why leadership in pictures?

Beause reading takes too long and leadership is time consuming!

Draw… don't write… and don't kill your team with PowerPoint!

catering to you!

We are pretty ‘bespoke’. Your leadership journey is unique to you, to your current situation. Leadership In Pictures is not a course. It won’t take you through a series of trainings with a certificate at the end. This is about developing you as a a leader. You can tap into what you need.

We do online coaching as additional support. Your team could come together and we can work virtually and draw pictures around your leadership learning needs. We can do onsite visits and professional learning support on request. Work out what you want to learn, or just browse and taste. Then we will ‘bespoke’ for you!

Feedback from those who have

I am an author, and I definitely like to read, yet I never felt the joy of reading so many important books in a very short period of time! Leadership in Pictures, summarizing books the way you do it there, I feel clever and the guilt of not reading, is gone.  It makes me real like a more effective leader. I can talk with more depth and communicate about leadership… and it’s easy… one picture.” -

- Amal - 2020-21 Aspiring leader; 2021-22 SLT Member and lead

We want to hear from you! Send us a message, feedback or question and we will be in touch.

We can’t wait to connect!

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My Leadership Journey

An invitation-only leadership development program for the Portland, Maine region beginning in the spring of 2020. You will learn how to:

• Recognize your strengths and opportunities as a leader
• Develop a leadership approach that engages others through effective communications and continuous feedback
• Use effective coaching and conflict resolution strategies to develop collaborative teams
• Generate value and achieve company results

The facilitators have over 50 years of combined experience leading teams and training leaders, managers, and organizations.

Seats for the upcoming session are by invitation only. Please  contact us  and we can set up an interview to see if the program is a fit for you.

My Leadership Journey Facilitators

Michelle Wyman

Douglas Packard

Steve Musica

Developing high performing leaders.