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.

There is no doubt about it, that being a leader has responsibilities and most of them are obvious, but still many leaders see their responsibility as being a very finite level, generally being what they have direct control over.

The reality is that leadership responsibility is horizontal and not vertical, meaning that leadership looks across the business as opposed just up and down it, the Executive Coaching Guru developed the TLeadershipModel to simply illustrate that where as management has vertical responsibility, leadership has a horizontal one.

The very essence of management is the achievement of outputs through the management of resources, the very essence of leadership is the achievement of outputs with the continued sustainabiltiy and legacy of a business. What’s important to understand is that leadership by its very definition entwined with responsibility and a sense of purpose that goes beyond the pure achievement of the task, leaders give value and reason to a business, aligning the everyday tasks to something that has a greater value and thus bringing value to all people at all levels.

Understanding this is very important as we hear about ‘credit crunch’ and the leadership of the financial markets, that is effecting the world currently, how has this come about? At its most basic it is a disregard of the TLeadershipModel and a limited focus on the horizontal.

People can at the most senior or junior levels can:

• become enamored by their own agenda, yes at a daily transactional level, but also on a more personal level that can flow between fear around capability, through greed and a personal agenda that has no interest in the business other than a mechanism for increased financial gain.
• see their value as being one of stewardship and development.

As an executive coach it is paramount that we advocate for the horizontal as well as the vertical, that stewardship and responsibility are our natural antidote for the current chaos and crisis that we see within the world markets and that as the pressure of the everyday transactional, output lead environment places pressure on the most authentic of leaders , the executive coach uses personal authenticity to enable senior managers to navigate their path.

Consider the following, that if you have ‘leadership’ within your personal self-definition, then you have responsibility to others, if you don’t see this as the case not only are you wrong, but you aren’t a leader, you are just a manager who has (unfortunately) control.

When younger you looked up to the person higher up, especially those people who had the title ‘Director’, which for many was/is the ultimate demi-god status and some directors are exactly what you are looking for; capable of leading the business on both an operational and strategic level whilst being able to also capture the hearts and minds of people within the business. The Executive Coaching Guru likes Peter Druckers perspective on this:

“The final requirement of effective leadership is to earn trust.
Otherwise there won’t be any followers and the only definition of a
leader is someone who has followers.” Peter Drucker

What hurts the most then is a business that had the ‘hearts and minds’ of it’s people and then started to throw it away, a business that has from the outset achieved what many other enterprises can only aspire to, having a workforce that is inspired by the energy of it’s entrepreneurial founder and gives ‘on mass’ the type of discretionary effort that then drives the business forward to become a darling of the city. But then something happens, the step from SME to Plc and somewhere in that growth there is a subtle sense of loss, that is only picked up on the periphery, by those that are listening to the people and then this loss starts to grow and grow, from a point where it was a given that 80%+ of the population identified with the business, and now below 50% see the business as a great place to work.

How does this loss happen? It is the familiar story of the drive for numbers (£/$) outweighing the capacity of the business to develop it’s leadership community from within and it’s inability to recruit people into that business that ‘believe’ in the journey and the community that already exists. It happens when a business fails to realise that it wasn’t the brilliant leadership that actually created the success, but the add value and discretionary effort that was contributed to the business by those people that ‘believed’ in the dream and reality of what it meant to work there. It’s the senior management team not realising that the business was successful in spite of the leadership and finally as the uber coach Marshall Goldsmith says:

“One of the greatest mistakes of a successful person is the assumption, “I am successful, I behave this way. Therefore I must be successful because I behave this way!” Marshall Goldsmith

One of the greatest challenges for an executive coach is to facilitate the reality for successful senior managers that sometimes, maybe even often, they and the business is successful in spite of their behaviour.

George Bernard Shaw in the film Pygmalion, wrote that, “The difference between a lady and a flower girl, is not how she behaves, but how she is treated”. This is a key factor for those of us involved in leadership, recognising that the emphasis is not on demanding behaviour, but in treating people in a manner that facilitates the elegant behaviours that already exist inside. The Executive Coaching Guru loves the idea that the, “more you lead, the less you have to manage”. As a business if you are losing the internal battle of staff advocacy and engagement, don’t blame the credit crunch, the tough times or any other factor, as your role as a leader is to (sit down for this revelation)……..LEAD!

Leadership is about the being with your business in the moment as well as thinking about the future. To understand about leadership in the moment, follow the link and read the speech made by Colonel Tim Collins (when he made this speech the reporter said, “he went out to talk to the troops about taking their malaria tablets, looked around and then realised they needed something more and then spoke without notes and captured the moment). This speech sets the balance of not worrying about the language, or whether the facts would be cascaded, but just delivering from the heart and understanding that if the message is understood, it will spread of it’s own accord.

• Being a Board Director is more than just numbers and achieving FTSE 100 status, it is about legacy, sustainability, integrity and something called ‘followship’, which is when the people decide to follow and the leadership team realise that making decisions based on ‘career and bonus’ aspirations will never deliver the value that decisions made on ‘people and sustainability’ produce.
• Board Directors share a duty that goes far beyond their fiduciary responsibility, in the same way that being a parent goes far beyond, feeding and clothing a child. People today do not require management in terms of their daily activity, they require leadership to enable them to contribute beyond yours and even their own expectations.
• Being a Board Director automatically comes with the badge of leadership, it’s time to not just step up, but to stand up!

Stand Up!