Business I have always felt has an identity all of its own, it’s difficult to understand it untill you get to work with many different people in many different organisations; in the guise of the Executive Coaching Guru, I have been privileged to work with hundreds of senior managers and leaders on leadership development programmes and executive coaching interventions; and one thing keeps coming up and that’s that the business makes demands!

Now the business is of course made up of managers who are in essence ‘making the demands’ but even they end up saying, “the business makes demands”, as if the business is in itself bestowed with its own identity, as if the business itself is sentient and calculating and maybe it is, maybe in some ways when groups of individuals come together there is an agreed group consciousness that bestows ‘personality to the business’ rather like owners of pets who anthropomorthise  (the attribution of human characteristics to non-human animal or non-living things, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts) their dogs and cats, then perhaps the same thing can be done for business as an entity.

What does this mean? Well if we allow ourselves to create an entity that doesn’t actually exist, if we empower the story of a ‘They’ and ‘It’, then we as leaders are weakened by the fact that we acknowledge a power over ourselves that doesn’t in fact exist. This is very important stuff! It goes to the heart of enabling people to be themselves, to have their own characters, characteristics, foibles and in some respects their own oddities.

When we as leaders seek to stifle the individual quirkiness, to knock out the ‘human being, from the human doing’ I know it is from the fear of the what ‘They’ will think, when in reality what is really happening is the personal fear of loosing ones own personality as people are over whelmed by the workload of email, project management, people management and politic.

 I work with people who are excellent at their jobs, who generally speaking are good people, who care about others, though often this circle of care has shrunk to a very small circle with family and sometimes line reports in it, this is the ever-growing pressure that many feel to conform and as one executive put it, “I have become beige!”

Leaders enable not just the intellectual and business skills growth, but true leaders, the ones that are reveried, remembered and referenced enable the people within the business to grow as people, to learn how to operate in a commercial context whilst not ‘hiding’ their identity, but overtly bringing it to the work place to add even greater value.

1. Do I welcome character in the interactions in the team/business?
2. Do I show my own?
3. Do I give room to my character and others in conversation?
4. Do I create space for the growth of character with work and factor that into development?
5. Do I understand the difference between character and personality? (“Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character” – Mr Wolf.Film-”Pulp Fiction”)
6. Do I blame the business for defining the culture in my own environment?

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.

“You have to be able to hear the grass grow” so said Bill Gates, he’s referring to the market place, and he went on to say, “If you wait for confirmed insights, all you will be able to do is scrabble for the crumbs with the rest of the procrastinators”.

I’d like to take that a step further and standing on the shoulders of the Mr Gates, aim this observation directly at business culture. Senior managers need to be able to ‘hear the grass grow’ in the primary market place of all leaders, their own back yard, the internal market, the one where Personal Brand & Reputation are integral to the internal consumers consumption of the ‘leadership agenda and communication piece’.

That’s right, ‘internal market place and internal consumers’, I have real issues with the manager who’s believes ‘we pay them, so they work’. I am at the same time still at 40yrs young, amazed when the ‘walk doesn’t match the talk’. Can you imagine a business leader (and if not I can introduce you) with turnover of up to 60% of it’s work force actually considering the delay of an Employee Satisfaction Survey, because as things are so bad, “why get told what we already know”. The answer sir is very simply, it’s not just about ‘listening’ to the grass grow (the analogy being the voice from your people), but you have to be (wait for it, revolutionary thinking coming up here) be seen to be listening, digesting, making changes and doing something proactive.

But of course this requires emotional investment, investment in relationship and worst of all time spent doing something that has on the surface an intangible output. I mean when (could take a year) will I see the difference? Where (turnover & employee satisfaction) will I measure it? How (happy staff do a better job and stay longer) will it save make me money?! This comes down to the cultural direction of a business, whether it is ‘values led or £ led’, whether or not the employee is ‘staff or colleague’.

Can you really say that you ‘hear the grass grow’ within your own business, if you can say yes to most of these then, well, then you should know your on the right path:

1.  You take the long way to get somewhere, enabling the business to know you are around.

2.  You have your own headset for the call center and pop in once a week (even if it’s to listen to 1call)

3.  Sometimes you just turn up at the depot and hop in a van for the day.

4.  You eat in the canteen.

5.  When you do eat in the canteen, which should be every day you are on a site, you walk up to people you don’t know and eat with them.

6.  On that note, you introduce yourself to every face you don’t know. For heavens sake they are in YOUR business.

7.  You don’t organise to visit any area of your business, sometimes you just turn up, see it for what it is.

8.  You ask people if they know who senior managers are and then when they don’t, you get your team to read this.

9.  Sometimes you have conversations about nothing of any consequence what so ever, if it’s the canteen, please don’t ask about figures.

10. If a face you used to see around the place has gone, you find out why and if they always seemed a decent person to you, trust that judgment and find out where they’ve gone. You locate their number, call them and find out for yourself if this is the case. Why are good people leaving my business!?