The definition of insanity is to continue to do the same thing and expect a different result, and in leadership, this is where I like to focus. Last month we talked about the fact that leadership is shifting in professional services, and it's not able to sustain itself if we just continue to do the things we used to do.

We're not in the industrial age, the information age, or the imagination age. Now we've stepped in to the intelligence age. It's that volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment that we work in that takes a different type of leader. It takes a transformational leader, not a transactional one. I promised you last month that what I'd do this year is take you through a series of shifts that would help you to go from where you are now to where you want to go.

And I want to make sure that we put a framework around that today and then in the coming months, we'll step through individually.

Over the past 17, 18 years, I've been working in professional services firms, developing leaders, shifting behaviour, changing results, and in my experience, I've had to take a few changes along the way and what I've done is I've put those together in a framework that I call 9 Shifts Leadership.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach for Professional Services, and today I want to continue our conversation around becoming a different leader in a different world, by helping you to understand the shifts that you need to make this year.

The first thing we need to understand is there are three areas of leadership that we need to develop, not just one.

The first area and the most important area is your personal leadership. This is where you work on leading you, and in my experience, I'm the most difficult person that I need to lead on a daily basis. So when you work on yourself, you're then able to excel in the other areas of leadership as well.

So, personal leadership is where it starts. Then it goes to professional leadership, and this is where you get results from your efforts. And then the third area is people leadership. That's where you take people on the journey with you, where you help them to do the things that you used to do. You bring them together in unity so that you achieve a common goal through individual efforts. And this is where you stop doing a lot of the things that you are doing and do it through other people.

So, in those three areas, I see three shifts that we need to make. But what's a shift?

A shift is going from where you are that's not getting you the results you want to where you need to be to not only get the results, but to be in sync with the world that we're working in right now.

Now these aren't set in concrete because I guarantee that over the years to come, as I continue to do this, I'm going to need to tweak and adjust these as well as the fast pace of change accelerates even further. AI has a bigger impact on what it is that we're doing, but for right now, these are the shifts.

And if we look firstly in the personal leadership area, the first shift is in your identity. Your identity is who you believe you are and who you believe you're not.  It's based on your brain wiring, your experiences, what you've believed about yourself over the years. And it's the foundation for everything that you do, everything that you think, everything that you say.

The shift is going from being conflicted with who you are, to being congruent with your true self, your values, what it is that you believe you are destined to do and to become.

The second area is in your intelligence. This is shifting from a singular outlook on intelligence, i.e, your cognitive intelligence, your technical ability to your multiple intelligences, and in particular your emotional intelligence and your social intelligence. It is well known these days that these are the number one skills for leaders in the current world.

And the third area in personal leadership is intention. Intention's about doing things on purpose. It's about shifting from being scattered, day-to-day seat of your pants, to being planned and knowing where your career fits in with the rest of your life, how it fits in with what it is that you are achieving in your lifetime. It's about making sure that your legacy is the one that you want it to be.

So that's the foundational personal leadership area.

Then we go into professional leadership, and as I said, professional leadership is about you getting results with your skills and your abilities from your own efforts.

The first area that we work on in shifting here is in your performance. It's about shifting from having a high performance mentality and practice alone, to one that's sustainable. Doing what you need to do, but doing it in a way that allows longevity and avoids burnout.

The second area is in your positioning. Positioning is about being seen in your marketplace, in your profession, in your firm, and it's about going from being invisible to being in demand, where you're a thought leader and where you are known for knowing things and people come to you and you get to choose the best fit clients.

And the third area is productivity. Productivity is all about shifting from focusing on time and not having enough time, and you know, focusing totally on that, and the old thing of time management that which didn't work back in the eighties when it was invented, to outcomes and looking at concurrent activity and doing things in a different way and looking at managing something that you can manage because you're not able to manage time, but you can manage your expectations, your environment, and your energy.

And then we go to the people leadership shifts.

The first one is resilience, and looking at resilience in a totally different way to how it's been taught over the years. You know, the professions within professional services have had this tough it out, you know, suck it up, work hard, and just keep going. And all that creates is problems in your health. And I know oh too well about that, having suffered myself and still be recovering from burnout. And this is a shift of going from being stressed all the time, with unhealthy forms of stress, to being strong, doing it, as I said, in a way that's sustainable. It's not just about you now, it's about you fostering that environment for your team as well.

The second area is relationships. Relationships are always going to be important. I don't care how much artificial intelligence, whether it's conversational AI or generative AI, it's not going to replace the relationships that you and I need to be able to do the things we need to do. And this is about shifting from conflict, because of differences of opinion and differences in identity challenges, to collaboration and working together and seeing that other people's opinions if they're different to yours doesn't diminish your own.

Being able to work with the differences of people being able to understand and read people and their behavioural style so that you can give them what they need, so in turn, they give you what you want. This is relationships internally in the firm. It's relationships with your clients, your suppliers, and everywhere else in your life as well.

And the ninth area, and the third area in people leadership, is results, and this is all about a shift in how you now get your results. Up until then, it's about you just doing everything. But now we're shifting from do to through. This is about being able to take others on the journey, empowering them so that they cannot only do some of the things that you do, but they can do other things as well. There's a distribution depending on the gifts and talents and bandwidth within people's week to get the job done together.

So, there they are, nine crucial shifts to be able to shift yourself from being a transactional manager to a transformational leader in the intelligence age.

So, let me ask you, of those nine areas, what would give you the biggest bang for your buck right now if you decided to focus on that area?

Is it something in you that you want to shift? Is it the way you operate or is it within your people leadership? I'd love you to join the conversation, get involved and reach out if you need to. And as I said, what I'm going to do is make sure that both in our 20 Minute Transformations and in the monthly videos that I'm going to post here, I'm going to help you and give you practical.

Instruction and tips and strategies to be able to make these shifts. There's not gonna be any pitch trying to sell you anything. I just wanna make sure that I can help more people. I'm engaged fully all around the world with different firms and individuals in professional services, and I don't get to be with everyone.

So I want to make sure that my calling of being able to do what I do in the area of professional services is met. So, join me in this conversation. Let's make it a two-way thing, not just me speaking to a screen. I'd love to hear from you and together we're going to make these nine shifts so that we can go from where we are now to where we actually would love to be at the end of 2026.

I look forward to working with you, and I'll see you on the inside.