The brightest and the best leaders often fail, strangely (for them) not because of a technical inability but because of behavours that detract from their capacity to deliver.

Timothy Galleway author of the Innergame of Work came up with a simple equation P=p-i (Performance=Potential-Interference) and it this interference that often dilutes a leaders capacity to succeed.

The fact that the business leader of today is being pulled and stretched like never before is not a new thing, this has been running directly in tandem with the lives that we are all living, I know my life has got quicker and increasingly full of economic, social and personal pressures in the last 5 years (which may well have something to do with reaching 40 years young).

But I can honestly say that things seem to really ramping up a notch, with a what I can only describe, as a sense of perceived helplessness for many senior business leaders. Within the current climate there is literally  no room to vote with your feet, many are trapped in a role that was not necessarily a vocational choice but it rewarded handsomely, moved them up the career ladder, satisfied various levels of personal validation and this covered for the fact that itself it wasn’t intrinsically rewarding. (It’s possible to swallow a bitter pill if you think the outcome is paid off  mortgage and a decent pension).

BUT and its is pretty big but, what happens when the climate changes and it goes into melt down, when the pressures of the role are such, that they threaten your ability to leverage your own position off a free market, when the market looks even more dubious than the situation you are in.

One of the programmes I am involved in, is I feel one of the most progressive leadership development experiences available today and there is a simple 5 minute segment of this 10 day, 5 module process that simply asks the participants to go outside and take some time with and for themselves (this isn’t quite as simple as it sounds as it sits a top of at that point: 3 days development, 360 feedback and a pretty full-on coaching session) and you know it never ceases to touch my heart that people sit down afterwards and say simply, “I can’t recall the last time I took 5 minutes just for me, not just watching TV to wind down, but actually just to really be with myself”.

Why does this matter and why does it happen? Because as Lynda Gratton from the London Business School says, “people become bewitched by their own agenda” and for me this means that one outcome of this can be losing ones identity to an agenda that envelopes us and slowly, cunningly, deceitfully takes away our true selves and thus our ability to truly lead.

So the Executive Coaching Guru offers the following thoughts:

1. When you find yourself talking to people, but you are thinking of what you are doing next, instead of being fully present with the individual(s) in front of you then. Stop, Breathe, Think, Re-focus. 
2. When you realise that you have too much work on. Stop. Talk to your staff, explain the workload and ask for their help and guidance and where needed. Coach, Support, Delegate, Direct.
3. When your bosses behaviour is without focus and reacting instead of leading. Create a moment in time, when you can look them in the eye and truly converse about how things are for them and how you can work together.
4. When you are at home and yet still at the office. Remember that to truly lead you need to be complete as a person and that ‘wholeness’ comes as a foundation from the home.

These are without doubt challenging times, for the last decade we were able to sail through, now it requires navigation.

Now the Executive Coaching Guru doesn’t feel it is his right to judge others, in regards to their personal appetites, whatever you get up to in the privy of your own dungeon is your business! But there are a few things that don’t sit comfortably.

As long as no one is getting harmed, then basically do what you want, but at the same time you are the leader of an organisation that operates at a global level and has incredible power in terms of its influence, not only within a global market but to all those that look up to their sporting heroes. So you see, it’s not just as simple a thing as saying “it’s a private matter”, because once you take on the mantel of leadership, especially within a marketing led business, then this comes with it’s own level of responsibilities.

Let’s use the example of parent hood, Max has sons, who I can only believe are embarrassed by the exploits of their father. But doesn’t Max have a responsibility to those boys that goes beyond the ‘not getting caught’ to the ‘not blinking well doing it in the first place’. Why? Simply because he had no right to place his family into a ‘potential’ situation where this might occur, which it did. Because these things always come out.

In the same way the Executive Coaching Guru believes that Mr Max Mosely had a responsibility to not place the sport he represents into a place where if something goes wrong, may create a situation that adversely affects it. But Mr Ecclestone (President and CEO of Formula One Management and Formula One Administration) denied that the claims threatened Mr Mosley’s position as president of the motor sport’s governing body, saying, “Has he in anyway damaged F1? No!”; he told the Daily Mail.

Really Mr Ecclestone, you can see nothing that connects the behaviour of this individual to the sport, I bet you’d be singing a different tune if you didn’t like the guy. If you don’t already know Mr Mosley is the fourth son of British World War II fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, a friend of Adolf Hitler, now if ever there was a warning sign that you might not want to get caught up in anything that even has the word German in it as a descriptor, I reckon that’s it.

So what is the message here, well it’s a simple one. The moment you step into a leadership role, you are bestowed with a weight of office that goes beyond the mere operational tasks that come with the role, I can’t believe for one moment that if asked if he believes leadership entails ‘only making the numbers’, that Mr Mosley would agree. No, he’d say, ‘there is more than just output generation to being a leader, one must live by a code that others can aspire to, you have to stand for something bigger than the job itself”. And if he is ever asked this, and replies with that line, I’d agree.

But somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen in the immediate future.