Today’s interview is with Julia Fabris McBride, Chief Leadership Development Officer at the Kansas Leadership Center and co-author of a new book called When Everyone Leads: How The Toughest Challenges Get Seen And Solved. Julia joins me today to talk about the new book, why we need to change the way we look at leadership, adaptive vs technical challenges and how to get started on creating a culture where everyone leads.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Building your house to be able to deliver a truly personalised customer experience – Interview with Greg Kihlström of The Agile Brand – and is number 456 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

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Here are the highlights of my chat with Julia:

• The Kansas Leadership Center has an audacious mission that aims to build the capacity of the state of Kansas and be a model for people outside the state about how to exercise leadership on the toughest challenges.
• Our main principle is leadership is an activity.
• Leadership is available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, and it starts with you.
• This book is not about leadership, at least not in the way that we normally think about it.
• We should abandon the word leader. We should stop talking about leadership teams. Yes, we need authority and we need structure to get the day-to-day done. But leadership, as we think about it, is challenge centric. It’s about asking what are our big aspirations, what are we most concerned about, and what are the challenges that we actually need everybody to pay attention to.
• Everybody has to exercise leadership in their sphere of influence to be able to move something forward.
• It’s moving from a person-centric model to a challenge-centric model of leadership.
• Key questions:
  • What are your boldest aspirations when you think about the future of this company?
  • What makes progress or leadership difficult in that gap between reality and aspiration?
  • What are the blockers?
• Adaptive challenges are really people challenges.
• If you haven’t read it then check out this book too: Maverick by Ricardo Semler.
• People tend to know the answers and can be brilliant if you just give them the opportunity.
• Often, leadership starts with a question.
• We need to move leadership from the job of one (or the few) to the job of the many.
• There’s a distinction between technical problems and adaptive problems. Technical ones require specific authority and domain expertise. Adaptive problems, however, sit outside these domains and could actually benefit from input from other people.
• Shifting or changing your culture is an adaptive challenge.
• Another great question:
  • What’s getting in the way of you feeling like you can step a little bit outside your job description, your day-to-day and your task list to be able to help us name and address the big challenges?
• The book contains real questions from people from all sorts of organizations and all sorts of levels in order to bring their concerns and how to apply this approach to life.
• Ask questions you don’t know the answer to.
• Julia’s Punk CX word: Raise the heat
• Julia’s Punk XL brand: Pinole Blue

About Julia

Julia Fabris McBride is chief leadership development officer at the Kansas Leadership Center, where more than 15,000 people around the world have attended programs since 2007. A certified coach, former actor and co-author of When Everyone Leads and Teaching Leadership, Julia splits her time between Wichita and Matfield Green, Kansas.

Check out the work that the Kansas Leadership Center do, grab a copy of When Everyone Leads: How The Toughest Challenges Get Seen And Solved, say Hi to them on Twitter @theklc and connect with Julia on LinkedIn here.

Thanks to researchleap.com for the image.