Overcoming the Silent Struggle: Building Better Leadership
How can you help your leaders build trust in each other and belief in themselves? How do you help them shift from siloed working to collaborative change? And how do you help them develop the skill and confidence to lean into all the conversations and challenges required at the leadership level?
The Silent struggle
It can be easier for leaders to pretend to not notice the conversations they really need to have. And it can be easier to say nothing than risk taking a position. Difficult conversations are called difficult for a reason. Especially when they are complex, unpredictable or emotionally loaded. These conversations are easier to avoid - at least in the short term.
What if they get it wrong or say something stupid? What if they really upset one of their people, or it ends in conflict in the leadership team? Or worse, a grievance! What if it looks like they don’t know what they’re doing in front of other colleagues? What if they’re seen as an imposter? What if opening their mouth derails their career!
Instead they get lost in silos, workloads, and the demands of constant change. Or they stay in their comfort zone and avoid being noticed. There are plenty of meetings and things are moving along, but you know there are deeper issues not being addressed. Issues that prevent your organisation making the progress it could. And issues that prevent them being considered for the next level of leadership.
Do you ever wonder if they are feeling a bit stuck? Eventually the safety of not leaning in will become a problem itself. It’s a tough place to be.
It’s a tough gig
I think leadership is a tough gig, and the higher up the levels of leadership you are the tougher it can get. It can feel like there’s a lot of expectation and judgement, with not alot of recognition and appreciation. Most leaders want to do a great job but they don't always know how, or have the confidence to do so.
What tends to happen instead is trust and engagement slowly erode through miscommunication and misunderstandings. There’s usually no defining moment, just a death by a thousand cuts of things that didn’t go to plan. We need to support our leaders to become better people so they will be better leaders.
It boils down to one thing
All of my big leadership learnings boil down to one thing - communication. The way your leaders move value through your organisation is via meetings, messages, emails, phone calls, video calls and conversations with other people. They communicate for a living!
Technical and operational expertise matters for sure. But leadership requires an additional set of skills and expertise that are often called soft skills.?
Soft skills are housed in a container called communication and held together by relationships
Soft skills are learnable
It turns out that soft skills are totally learnable. Highly successful leaders learn these soft skills and put them into practice. These skills enable your leaders to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. It means they can balance people and performance. Avoiding these skills is a prescription for failure.
Knowing me, knowing you?
First your leaders need to be able to relate. What might not be so obvious, is that good leadership starts with your ability to relate to yourself. Change follows self-awareness. Self-awareness creates choices for how you manage yourself so you can better connect with others.?
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Then it's about relating to others. Being able to adapt and connect with a variety of personalities and character traits, while navigating the behaviours that play out from them. Your leaders need to build knowledge about how others are different to them, how to recognise it, and how to speak with others in their language. This is Emotional Intelligence in practice.
Knowing what to say and how to say it
Next they need to communicate effectively. I think leaders need to master the mechanics of about eight types of conversations. Conversation mechanics on their own would be clunky without the ability to relate ("Good God, we're not robots Mr Spoc!").
Where Emotional Intelligence meets conversation mechanics, high value dialogue takes place. Now you have some chance of getting the results you are individually and collectively going after.
Better and bigger thinking
Ultimately your leaders are there to solve problems and get results for your organisation. Being better able to relate and communicate is critical. However, your leaders need to be able to recognise and navigate contemporary business environments. They need better and bigger leadership thinking.
Leadership thinking requires leaders to step back from the day-to-day to look at the big picture. The demands on leaders to navigate their businesses in the current climate adds increased layers of complexity and challenge.
When you have better and bigger thinking, you have an increased ability to see the world as it actually is, rather than through the lenses of perception. Bigger and better thinking provides your leaders with greater flexibility in how they respond to challenges. It means they are able to hold a more expansive worldview and a greater bandwidth for human experience.
Cultivating a passion for change
Leadership transcends mere problem-solving and financial analysis. It's about fostering a culture that inspires others to follow. In today's world, we face daunting challenges like climate change and inequality, which demand a new breed of organisation leader.
These leaders must broaden their perspective to encompass economic, social, and governance responsibilities. They require tools to navigate through change, uncertainty, and emergence. Yet, perhaps most crucially, they must grasp how to effect systemic change.
It's not just about charting a course for the business. It's about independent thinking that contributes to collective growth. It's the convergence of personal, professional, and global journeys.
To truly lead, your leaders must forge an emotional connection. They must cultivate a passion for change, where authenticity reigns, and they can inspire others to join them on this transformation. This is how cultures thrive and organisations flourish.
Things to think about
Would you like to do some work together? I work with individuals, teams and organisations to transform leadership and lives through tailored coaching, training and development programs. I take a human-centred approach to leadership that inspires confidence and creates impact. To explore possibilities send me a message, email, or book a call from my website.