You're not the only one...

Last Friday I had the pleasure to host a 90 minute live virtual coaching session with 50 subscribers to this newsletter. We had participants from all of the world – individuals from Australia to Zimbabwe, the United States to the United Kingdom, the Philippines to Saudi Arabia – and an equal number of men and women. And all of the participants had at least one thing in common, a thirst to become better problem-solvers and an understanding that true leadership is about unlocking the potential in the people around you.

For the first section of the session I set the table with a discussion of people acting like termites, management vs leadership, and a review of the characteristics of leadership. However, for the bulk of the session I took live questions directly from the participants. We had questions about how to get colleagues aligned on metrics, how to resolve conflict with long-term business partners, the difference between change warriors, resistors, and sceptics; and many other questions. 

One question, in particular, I thought would be useful to share with the whole newsletter audience. 

Question

“…recently I moved into a new job with an ecommerce company – one of the largest – it is an extremely fast environment and that means that business priorities take precedent over everything else. So in such an environment people tend to experience burnout, experience fatigue and a feeling that hard work isn’t being recognized. I’m not in leadership at the company, so how can I build an environment that leads to less burnout and less turnover?”

My Answer

“In my experience, the thing you think is a problem, other people think it’s a problem. What’s happening is, people know it’s a problem but they think they can’t talk about it. They think they don’t have time to talk about it. They think nobody wants us to talk about it. I’m willing to bet other people want to talk about it and that the people who are experiencing this problem have ideas about how to make it better. So, I suggest, start the conversation.”  

I was incredibly pleased with the positive responses and enjoyed working with such a broad cross-section of leaders.  While I currently only do this kind of work with organizations and teams, this session demonstrated that individuals from all kinds of organizations and all over the world can learn from each other in a leadership development and coaching setting.

Therefore, I would like to make this a new part of our training curriculum. There is clearly appetite from individuals to gather with other like-minded professionals, working on their problem-solving and leadership skills. This is an opportunity to learn from each other and realize you face similar issues and to have a give-and-take on those topics where you’d like some advice from me. If you are interested in taking advantage of this kind of offering and gathering with others like you, please tell us a little more about yourself HERE.