Blue Ocean Leadership

Imagine that you lead a team of people who perform consistently, and produce steady results. Although their output is regular and reliable, they're no longer trying out new approaches or reaching new goals.

You'd like your team to keep developing, to advance, and to win further success for the organization. You want to provide it with the motivation and support it needs to do this, but your time and budget are limited. Is there a way that you can encourage your team to improve its performance without spending money or wasting time?

This is where Blue Ocean Leadership could help. A well-known British retail group applied it to re-engage its team members and to lead them to do what they needed to succeed. Its staff turnover dropped from about 40 percent to 11 percent, and its recruitment costs reduced by 50 percent. [1]

In this article, we'll look at Blue Ocean Leadership – an approach you can use to motivate your team and raise its performance, without spending much money or wasting valuable time.

What Is Blue Ocean Leadership?

Blue Ocean Leadership was created by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, and is based on their theory of Blue Ocean Strategy. It's about making changes to the way your team members work by engaging with them and motivating them to succeed.

Kim and Mauborgne describe leadership as a service that team members either "buy" or "don't buy," and which can affect how invested they are in their work. Blue Ocean Leadership is about encouraging your team to buy into your leadership so that everyone's engaged, committed and motivated.

Putting Blue Ocean Leadership Into Practice

Blue Ocean Leadership uses a four-step approach: [2]

Step One: Focus on Acts and Activities

According to Blue Ocean Leadership, a person's actions are easier to change than their values. This step is about looking at how effectively your team member completes tasks. It's about reviewing their actions, and providing them with guidance and feedback to boost their motivation and increase their productivity.

Your team member can become discouraged if they're told that they must change as a person. Offering constructive feedback on their actions instead of focusing on their flaws can make them feel valued, and can motivate them to succeed.

Lots of leadership strategies center on changing the manager's behavior and encouraging people to develop skills such as empathy and self-awareness. Blue Ocean Leadership addresses a team member's actions directly and allows them to make positive changes to the way they carry out tasks.

Step Two: Connect Leadership to Market Realities by Engaging People

This step is about setting goals for your team member that are realistic and achievable. People are more likely to reach their goals if they're engaged with them.

For example, if you tell someone that they must respond to customer requests for refunds quickly, but you do nothing about the inefficient process your organization uses for making refunds, that person is going to be frustrated and uninspired.

Blue Ocean Leadership encourages you to discuss the obstacles that prevent your staff member from doing their job effectively. Ask them how your actions can affect their productivity and whether there's anything you can do to help. Make sure that they have everything they need to succeed.

When a team member can help to shape the activities that will affect their performance, they feel that their opinion counts, and they're more motivated to perform at their best.

Step Three: Distribute Leadership Across Different Management Levels

Blue Ocean Leadership focuses on distributed leadership. This is where leaders at every level of an organization are empowered to deliver high performance, not just those at the very top. This responsibility is pushed down through each layer of management, reaching every team member, and resulting in peak performance across the organization.

This step is about making sure that every leader in your organization is committed to making positive change. The key point is that every leader, regardless of their level within the organization, needs to take the action that's needed for their team to succeed.

Blue Ocean Leadership recognizes that managers at different levels need to have different leadership skills depending on the tasks they're required to do, the degree of power they hold, and the environment they're working in.

Kim and Mauborgne recommend creating leadership profiles for each level of management to lift individual and organizational performance. To encourage company-wide support, the profiles are developed by a cross-section of managers and non-management team members, who are tasked with evaluating activities in their team to identify:

• Low-impact activities – Tasks that take up a lot of time but achieve little.
• High-impact activities – Tasks that get results but don't get a lot of backing from leadership.

Team members are also invited to suggest additional high-impact activities that they believe could benefit the team.

The group uses its findings to draft an ideal leadership profile, which highlights the types of leaders best suited to each level of management. This is presented to senior managers and board members, who work to match leaders to these profiles in the future, throughout the organization.

Take a look at Building Tomorrow's Leaders and The Leadership Pipeline Model for more practical tips on identifying and developing leaders in your organization.

Step Four: Pursue High-Impact Leadership Acts and Activities at Low Cost

Kim and Mauborgne suggest that leadership practices are often seen as an addition to people's regular workload. Blue Ocean Leadership recognizes this and provides a way to trim down your To-Do List, allowing you to focus on the tasks that will lead your team members to success.

This step is about motivating a team member by making sure that the tasks they work on are engaging, relevant and worthwhile – for them as an individual and for the organization.

Kim and Mauborgne describe how some tasks and activities can be resented by your team, be time-consuming for you, and be unappreciated by the people above you. Examples could be using complicated file-naming conventions, or following lengthy procedures for archiving data.

Of course, there are always jobs that must be done, however tedious they feel. This step is about cutting out the activities that have the lowest impact, leaving more time for you to focus on high-impact activities that motivate your people and allow them to get the right results.

From "The Four Pillars of Blue Ocean Leadership" by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, 2014. Reproduced with permission. See Blue Ocean Strategy for more information.