Do you have enough space to develop?

Do you have enough space to develop as a leader?

In the circles that I travel, leadership is something everyone wants to develop, but few can agree on what leadership really is. There are so many different notions about leadership that it’s difficult to know?what?to develop when we want to develop our leadership.??

Here’s my take: The leader is the one who is most present.??

Presence is the experience of being fully in the moment, open to what is actually happening, both outside and inside of yourself, and able to appropriately engage with that reality.??

When we're not fully present (read: most of us, most of the time), we are usually caught in our unconscious patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, which are mostly based on our past conditioning, personality patterns, and experiences. Over time, these patterns become like the well-worn grooves of a stream, which get deeper and deeper over time, ultimately becoming more like canyons.??As with the water in the canyon, these patterns can become deeply entrenched and are the real obstacles to presence, and therefore to leadership.

For example, let’s say that you’re an executive in a meeting with the rest of your leadership team, and you’re in the midst of a debate with one of your key functional leaders about a critical decision related to an upcoming product launch. You have disagreed in the past about this very same issue, and now the timeline for the launch is on the line if you can’t get to resolution together.??The debate is about to amplify into an argument...??

• Are you tuned into your body enough to sense the tensions or sensations in yourself that signal that you’re about to loose objectivity and cross over the line into either acting out in anger or withdrawing in passive aggressive resentment???
• If you do catch yourself before reacting, do you have the capacity to objectively see and take ownership for your own part in the impasse, at least silently, to yourself??
• Are you able to really listen to your colleague and the other team members with curiosity and openness, or are you suddenly reacting out of an underlying fear or story?
• Are you blind to your own triggers and underlying motivations, or are you clear, open, and present to fully engage in real dialogue with the team???

When you’re working to develop yourself as a leader you need the openness to become curious about these blind spots, and the courage to experiment with the way you relate to your feelings, the conversations you have, and the actions you take.??As the patterns begin to loosen up through greater awareness and practice, they will have less of a grip on you and you’ll discover that you actually have more moment-to-moment choice about your experience and behaviors than you once thought.?

In order to start noticing, confronting, and working with these obstacles in yourself you need space.??

The space I'm referring to here is mostly about having space in our psyche, not necessarily about having time in our calendar - although that can sometimes help too!??In working with these obstacles we need at least some capacity to slow down, reflect on our experiences, and intentionally experiment with new ways of being and responding to our environment.??Without this, our best intention of developing ourselves will be just another unfinished project, leaving us stuck in the same underlying patterns.?

We need more space so that we can develop greater presence as leaders.

One of the biggest culprits behind this lack of space is the increasing stress and sense of being overwhelmed that we, as a society, are swimming in.??Thanks to?Moore's Law?and ever-increasing processing power, we're flooded with more information, interruptions, and potentially meaningful STUFF to make sense of every day than ever before.??The volume and speed of information flow at work and in our personal lives are increasing at seemingly exponential rates, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep up with the incoming, while still being responsible to what we’ve already committed.??It's kind of like the old "frog in the pot" analogy: the water's getting hotter and hotter, but we're really not conscious of it as it’s happening - we're getting cooked!?

Worse, this dynamic is starting to create a sneaky glorification of always-on busyness.??How many times have you responded to a friend's "how are you?" with a somewhat self-important "really busy, but good!"???It's almost as if we, the frogs, feel more power or importance the more that we can take the heat - the subtext being a resistance to questioning the possibility that it could be any other way.

There is another way. And it doesn't necessarily involve quitting your job and moving into a monastery!

Here are some things to consider if you're a leader and you’re identifying a bit too much with the frog:

Right-size your responsibilities

One thing that can happen in the proverbial pot is that, over time, you’ve said yes to way more ongoing responsibilities than you can reasonably handle.??As a human being you have limits. Take some time to assess all of the ongoing areas in your work and life for which you are responsible:?

• Professional roles and responsibilities – any areas you’re on the hook for in an ongoing way.?
• Personal areas of focus and responsibility – things like family, parenting, relationships, finances, hobbies?

Once you take the time to define all of these and see them in one place, it can be easier to get a felt sense of whether your overall load is still manageable or not.??Maybe there's an ongoing committee you're currently on that doesn't make sense any more, an entire area of business responsibility that is ripe for delegation, or a change to your organization's design that will more appropriately handle what is now being called for.??Sometimes this right-sizing of higher-level responsibilities will require you to have some important and perhaps tricky conversations with your boss, your team, or your family.??

This kind of conversation can sometimes be difficult.??There are often external factors that can leave you with less freedom or control about your workload than others might have.??But it can be easy to forget that you probably do have at least some say about what's on your plate and what's not, and you may have more ability to create these kinds of changes than you assume.?

Decrease the load of incoming stuff

Do an inventory of all of the inputs of your physical and digital life and start making some decisions to cut the cord on some and consolidate others.??This could include any and all of the following:

• Get off group email lists that don't matter to you any more.??Unsubscribe to whatever you've become numb to in your inbox.??Marketing from other companies, messages from old teams with which you were once active, automated messages from your internal communications department.??They are all great examples of emails ripe for either unsubscribing, creating a junk email rule, or sending a request to remove you.?
• Have a conversation with your team about your agreements about how you communicate with each other. Are you in a culture where everyone cc's everyone on everything and email has become more a forum for an exponentially expanding flow of conversations you don't need to be a part of???How effectively and efficiently are you using group meetings as a mode of communication? Have text messages or IM's replaced email, even with non-urgent communication???Those are a few ideas of where to start.
• Have an honest look at the time and attention you spend on social media like LinkedIn and facebook and, if you're not going to cut the cord entirely, consider overhauling your alert settings so that you get fewer of them.

Upgrade your self-management system

In my experience as a coach, I’ve seen that sometimes the real cause of the stress and lack of space is less about the volume of a leader’s responsibilities, and more about how they?manage?their commitments about all of that stuff.??In other words, do they have a trusted, leak-proof method to name, track, and follow-through on all of their commitments in a sustainable way, or are they flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to this aspect of self-management??

Has your overflowing email inbox become your default (unmanageable) task-list???Is your head swimming in thoughts about all of the open loops in your work and life???Are you waking up the middle of the night with fears that something important has fallen through the cracks?

Good self-management is about having a consistent, ongoing way to manage all of the commitments you have with yourself in a way that you can feel complete about all that is not yet finished – in a way where you can be more present, without having to finish everything.

Without some good self-management practices, those open loops will likely keep spinning in your psyche, making it impossible to relax or have any space to breathe and reflect. You end up with no space because your mind is caught in an endless loop of reacting to the latest and loudest, losing any sort of higher perspective or peace of mind.

If this sounds familiar, I recommend setting aside some time to get up and running with the productivity approach called "GTD", which is short for?Getting Things Done, the name of the best-selling book by David Allen. I got my start as a coach working under David doing workflow coaching with hundreds of executives to help them get up and running with this approach, and I’ve witnessed many find that clear space in the process.??I’ve studied many other self-management and productivity approaches, but none have addressed the fundamental difficulties inherent in the modern work environment as completely as GTD.

The title may make it seem like the book is all about adding more and more to-dos to your life.??It’s not.??The essence of the approach is that it offers more awareness and intentionality about all of the commitments you do make, and results in a lot more clear space in our psyche about them. Even though it was originally published over 20 years ago, the principles and practices outlined in this book will always be relevant as long as human beings have more to do than time to do it in.??

If you are on a path of developing as a leader and you suspect that one of the things most getting in they way of your process right now is a lack of space, consider trying one or two of these strategies.??Once there’s at least a bit more space, the deeper work of developing yourself as a leader can have some more breathing room.