Susan Carroll

Working with with busy executives, this is an issue which crops up more frequently than not. Too busy and not enough time to do it all.  Wishing to be more strategic and effective as a leader but the day to day business of their working lives simply takes over. The unique window of time when they first took the job and had brilliant aspirations for the role is over. It’s been replaced by constant tactical decisions, the frenzy of email and endless meetings.

How often do you plan and organise your working day or week only to have it hi-jacked? Something else that you hadn’t planned for [usually someone else’s priorities] takes over. No-one works in a vacuum of course. There are reports to be compiled, the pressure for the quarter end results, presentations to be created, complaints to be handled, financial data to review, meetings to attend. These things demand immediate attention. There’s the guilty feeling of not spending as much time thinking about strategic direction as the role demands. Or communicating more effectively with people. The office can be a stressful place. Do you recognise any of this as the pattern of your working life?

So how do you make a change? How do you break the cycle of being very busy, maxed out even? You may feel you’re not achieving your goals in a way that’s more compatible with how you’d like to lead your life.

Sometimes, we fall into a trap of thinking leadership is something we have to do in addition to our job. If we view it as an ‘extra’ and not the main event, then we risk not fulfilling our leadership potential.

“Leadership is not something you do in addition to your job. It is your job”

Ken Chenault, American Express

 

So what can you start doing straight away which will help you make that shift from ‘too busy leader’ to respected leader who makes a difference to people and results?

Here are 5 things that will bring change for you:

 

What’s your vision?

Whatever size your company, division, department or team is, having a vision is vital. The reason a vision is so important is that it gives you a magnetic draw for everything you do. It gives meaning and purpose to the work you do as there is a context, a bigger picture.

How are you communicating?

I met someone at a conference who declared that his job was to interpret communication from senior management and no, he wasn’t working in a multilingual organisation or the United Nations. His role was to listen to what management was saying, interpret it in the same language, then go out and communicate it further down the line, again in the same language. Astonishing though that sounds, in some organisations, this is normal behaviour. How in touch are you with the people who are working with you? Do you speak in a way that needs interpretation before your audience can understand it, even though you share a common language?

Have you created a team?

When a group of people work together on a compelling goal, something they all care about, they become a team. Lots of leaders talk about teamwork yet don’t invest in teams or their development.  Provide the space and time a team requires in order that it can become the architect of its own success.

Are you giving regular feedback?

Feedback? That funny, static noise musicians get when they stand too close to the amps or speakers? It’s direct, immediate and loud and clear. They adjust accordingly.  They do that immediately, not when the concert is over. Feedback is so helpful and yet many people fear it. Not surprising, as it is often given indirectly, late and in a negative way. Feedback can be your friend. It is information which gives us insight into the patterns of our behaviours. It gives us choice. Give it generously with the best of intentions and receive it back just as generously.

Do you show appreciation and recognition?

Most of us enjoy recognition … for expertise, for results, for making a difference. Even if it’s our job to do those things, it’s a human desire to be appreciated and valued. Many companies introduce complicated schemes that negate the immediacy and sincerity in saying thanks for a job well done.  Often, a simple and sincere thank you hits the mark more effectively. However you show appreciation, make it simple and sincere.

 

These are just some of the things you can do to improve your leadership impact. If you’d like to know more, we’d love to hear from you.

 

Photo credit – Brendan Welshby

Are you doing everything?
As a leader, are you immersed in the tactics, the business of your work and overlooking the development of your staff?

 

Here’s what happens when you “do it all”: you take away the opportunity for your staff to learn, grow and develop.

 

When you jump in, because it’s easier and quicker for you to do it yourself, you are stifling learning, for you and for them. You may think it’s easier and quicker for you to do it, and you may be right, but not over the longer term. If you’re always busy doing instead of developing, you’re too busy missing opportunities for you as well as for others.

• Develop your staff
• Delegate more effectively. It’s called delegating, not dumping. Teach, train, show, demonstrate and check in to encourage and see progress. You’ll learn too.
• Divide up the work and give others the chance to learn… interesting things and not just just the things you don’t want to do
• Declare an interest in people around you and back it up with some real development opportunities

 

When you hold on to everything and insist on doing it yourself,  you take away the opportunity for those around you to grow and develop.

 

Will they make mistakes that you could avoid by doing it yourself? Maybe. They may also come up with something even better. Either way, they’ll learn and so will you.

 

What one single step can you take today, this week, this month to develop the people in your team and in your  organisation?   Do the right thing and invest in developing your staff.

 

Photo credit – Dawn Ellner

Pick up most business books from the past decade or two and they’re packed with examples of organisations with great visions and heroic leaders for us to consider as role models and exemplars. As fairly recent history has revealed, some of those megastar leaders have turned out to have had feet of clay. Their organisations either no longer exist or have been exposed as espousing noble values to the world whilst privately forsaking them in the pursuit of the bottom line or the lining of their own pockets.

 

Are you a reluctant leader?

Are we expecting too much of the modern-day leader? Multiple stakeholders, matrix organisation, visionary, strategic, values led, agility, innovative, handling pressure, business changes, tough decisions, impact on people, the need for speed, customers, competitors, products & services, teamwork, the press & media, not to mention diversity, ethics and sustainability?

Frankly, who’d choose to be a leader in this networked, fast-paced, highly transparent, digital age? When there’s not just scepticism, but outright cynicism about leadership in the 21st century? In the face of this cynicism, are you a reluctant leader?

 

Leadership and employee engagement – the bleak story

According to Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, of America’s roughly 100 million full-time employees, 70 million (70%) are either not engaged at work or are actively disengaged. That number has remained stagnant since Gallup began tracking the U.S. working population’s engagement levels in 2000. The UK has a similar employee engagement deficit; surveys indicate that approx one third of UK workers say that they are engaged. Leadership is a critical factor in creating a culture that focuses on service to customers and service to employees and the knock on effect in engaging both employees and customers. All roads lead to culture and it’s leaders who create the culture.

 

Who amongst us, if held up to public scrutiny, would pass muster?

Who are the leaders that we can trust? Who can we depend upon to lead our organisations and connect the purpose and meaning of work to everyday activity so that people can become more engaged at an emotional level? What about all the leadership qualities that we aspire to, that we talk about, that we look for in those around us? Ask almost anyone and they’ll say there isn’t one leader who ‘has it all’. Why do we put people on pedestals only to react when we discover they are flawed?  Let’s stop looking for the superhero leaders, those mythical people who are perfect in every way. Let’s stay away from the ‘5 tips to be a great leader’ and the leader-lite ‘one size fits all’ leadership approach.

 

Who can we depend on to lead organisations?

Leaders that we can believe in earn their leadership though life experience, through sticking to their values in tough times and through displaying humility and vulnerability as well as the drive and passion you’d expect to encounter.  They build great leadership teams and invest in people’s development because they understand that it is through others that success comes. They are flawed and they recognise their flaws because they’ve looked in the mirror and seen the truth of themselves and want to continue learning and developing. They continue to lead because it’s fulfilling and they create change in the world. I am privileged, through my work, to meet passionate leaders who care about people and create thriving organisations. They are everyday heroes doing extraordinary things on a daily basis

 

Become a connected leader

Successful leadership relies on connectedness. How to you become and stay connected to your vision and purpose? To your people and clients? To innovation and results? As a leader, you must invest energy and time into all these areas. Each of them is connected to all of the others: they are the parts that form a whole leadership.

Maintaining these connections is challenging. But becoming a Connected Leader means being an authentic and thriving leader. Without connectivity, leadership falters.

Connected leaders challenge themselves as well as others. They have a clear vision that includes and develops those around them. They understand that achieving their leadership goals depends not only on their internal desires, but on their connections with people and ideas.

 

Let the business books for the 21st century tell of a different kind of leader, so that future readers can be inspired by a more lasting legacy, but more importantly, right now, organisations need those leaders, reluctant or otherwise.

When you hear a damn good quotation, like the title of this blog post, the likelihood is quite high of it having been written by Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. Or Oscar Wilde. He was an Irish writer, poet and playwright and had a gift of saying the profound in a concise and witty way. But surely being yourself is as easy and natural as…. well, just being yourself?

 

Yet, how often do we behave in incongruous ways? To please someone else, to prove we are smart, to get a result, to be seen to say ‘the right thing’, to be seen to do ‘the right thing’, to avoid criticism, to fit in, to follow the crowd.

Like the donkey in the lion’s skin from Aesop’s fables, are we at times pretending to be someone or something we are not?

 

What’s it like to not be yourself? Well, it can mean saying yes when we really want to say no. Or saying no when we really want to say yes. It can mean behaving in a way which conflicts with our values.  It can drive low self-esteem and that can make us feel miserable.

 

So what’s it like to be yourself?  Only you know the answer to that! But let me tell you about a client who took on a role as a leader reporting into a boss with a fearsome reputation. This position had seen a fairly frequent rate of turnover as the boss operated a culture of fear based on failure and firing.

 

Before her first meeting with him, we spent time discussing potential scenarios, to find an approach that allowed her to act in a way that was true to herself.  At the meeting, her boss flew into a rage at the sales figures and demanded that she account for herself and her part of the business. How did she react? Like so many before her, did she explain, apologise, justify, promise to do better, to change? Did she try to appease? No, she responded firmly and politely, but mostly firmly. She challenged back and told him what she needed, what she wanted, in order to meet the goals. She asked for support, time and resources. She also established some principles of behaviour between them and stressed how she’d like them to work together. In being refreshingly honest with him, something he’d rarely, if ever, experienced before, she totally avoided behaviours that would enable him to revert to angry type. She got everything she needed, including respect. That she was not desperate to impress freed her, in her mind. It freed her up to be herself.

 

Here’s 5 things to consider if you’d like to ‘Be Yourself’ more often:

Value your value:

Cut out or replace the self-sabotaging self-talk or beliefs that can dominate when you try something different or something new. Listen to the ones that help you instead. Known as those ‘voices in our head’, they are the beliefs we hold about ourselves. Our beliefs are powerful. They are what help us to be good at what we do and who we are. Thing like we believe we can learn, be successful, have an interesting job, be a good friend, a compassionate leader. Our beliefs can also trip us up. They hold us back, make us afraid, and afraid to overcome the feeling of being afraid. Believe in your own value and value it. Value yourself.

 

 Find your Flow:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian psychology professor is known as the person behind the concept of ‘flow’.  By that, he meant the mental state we achieve when we’re performing an activity and immersed in a feeling of focus, full involvement, and enjoyment and ease in whatever it is we are doing. That has always existed; he was the one to study it and label it.

 

To experience joy and ease, the opposite of misery and low self-esteem, is not to be sniffed at, right? If you want to truly ‘be yourself’, find out what creates flow for you and create even more opportunities to experience it. In this way, you’ll increase those moments of focus, full involvement, joy and ease.

 

 Trust in trust:

Listen to yourself more often. Listen to your intuition. Bear Grylls has described the time how he’d had a niggling feeling about the ropes and the equipment during a climbing expedition. He didn’t listen carefully to his intuition, didn’t act on it and was injured by falling equipment: “I learned another valuable lesson that night: listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind.” Trust yourself in other ways too: doubt and fear can sabotage our efforts before we even start. Trust yourself to know, to act, to achieve and to be…

 

Deepen your development:

Find out more about yourself. Explore your strengths and change beliefs and behaviours that hold you back from being yourself. If you shake off the shackles of who you think you’re meant to be, more of ‘you’ will emerge. So what if that’s the way you think you’re meant to be or do things? So what if that’s what was expected of you yesterday, last month, 10 years ago, a lifetime ago? When you are learning, growing and developing, you are open to change and finding out who you are and just who you can be

 

Connect with courage:

Sometimes when you become more yourself, others around you may react. They may not like this development, this change in you. Whilst we may have a responsibility towards others to understand, with empathy, how our behaviour influences them, we are not in charge of or responsible for others’ reactions. So go ahead and do what’s right for you without doing harm to others. The more likely reaction is one of receptiveness and encouragement. We’re attracted to people who are genuine and ‘being themselves’. And by the way, most people won’t even notice. There’s not a massive audience out there taking notes on all your behaviours. They’re a bit busy getting on with their lives and being themselves.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s nearly Christmas. I’m willing to bet you’re spending these last weeks of the year busy with work demands while also trying to make sure everything’s in place for a magical Christmas at home.

Taking a break, it seems, is not always relaxing. Those tantalising two weeks away from the office, indulging in food, fun and time with the family, seemed very real and exciting in November. By December, it’s disappearing in a haze of must-dos on two fronts. Before we’ve had time to breathe, it’s January.

Why does this happen? And what can we do to make sure that Christmas doesn’t become just another time-consuming to-do list?

 

A story of Christmas stillness

In the lead up to one Christmas, I was heavily pregnant with my second son, due on 19^th December. There was nothing that could be done but wait for his arrival, and adapt our Christmas to it as best we could.

Every day started with anticipation, and ended with uncertainty. The 19^th came and went, and so did the 25^th. He eventually arrived on 27^th December, and we called him Gabriel.

He was, of course, the perfect Christmas gift. We had no choice but to wait patiently for him, to simply live in and enjoy the moments as they came and went.

 

Making a choice to be busy

That Christmas, I wasn’t able to be busy. I had no choice but to wait until Gabriel came. When there is a choice to be made, it’s very easy to decide to be busy. We do this without realising it, because it doesn’t feel as if we have a choice.

As much as we crave relaxation, we fear idleness. We want time to do nothing, but when the opportunity arises to have it, we fill that time with tasks. At Christmas, we call these tasks ‘traditions’. Some of these are universal, like putting up a tree or cooking a turkey. Others are personal, like visiting relatives or taking a country walk on Boxing day (or St Stephen’s Day as the 26^th is always to me).

Traditions can be magical, the foundations of precious memories. They can also weigh us down with expectation, and if they don’t happen, guilt. A list of Christmas traditions quickly becomes just another to-do list.

 

What do you really value?

The value of any tradition comes in its meaning. The value of a Christmas tree lies not in the tree itself, but in the focal point it provides. It is somewhere to gather around, somewhere to keep and open presents, and something to enjoy decorating.

Buying and decorating a tree can be a chore, something else to take away from valuable relaxation time. Unless you choose to see it as relaxation in itself, an experience to be shared rather than work to be done. Or you could simply decide not to bother with a tree at all, if it doesn’t suit you to have one.

 

Take a break

Of course, it’s not always that simple. Deciding not to have a tree might be pretty much impossible if you have a house full of expectant children (and perhaps expectant adults). Likewise, choosing not to visit relatives can be tough, especially if it means others are upset. But you can almost certainly choose not to go to every party you’re invited to. You can choose to buy the Christmas foods you really want to eat, rather than the ones you think you should have.

Identify what matters to you about Christmas. With everything you plan to do, ask yourself how it contributes to the things that matter. If something doesn’t contribute, find a way to change it or scrap it. We don’t need to do nothing to relax. But we do need to make wise choices about the things we do.

 

Simple pleasures

What matters to me at Christmas is the simple pleasure to be had in enjoying time with family & friends. Patrick Kavanagh, a poet from Co Monaghan, seems to capture this best in his poem, A Childhood Christmas. He was a master of making the ordinary extraordinary through the sparse medium of poetry.

My favourite verses are:

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

 Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.

Take a moment to read the full poem here.

I hope you enjoy it too. I grew up a stone’s throw from ‘Cassidy’s hanging hill” and feel a deep sense of connection with the words and their sense of place and childhood. It makes me think about my own childhood Christmases and those of my children, and of people no longer here to enjoy Christmas with.

If we can recreate that feeling, those connections, in our own homes this Christmas, we may reach January content, satisfied with the time that’s gone and optimistic for the year to come.

When we’re back at our desks, perhaps we will have learned something about how to identify what is important to ourselves and others, a lesson we can use in leadership as much as we can at home.

 

Instead of sending Christmas cards to clients and colleagues  Scala Advance has donated to 2 charities which work with homeless people:

Focus Ireland, which believes that everyone has a right to a place they can call home and which campaigns to address the causes of homelessness

https://www.focusireland.ie/

and

Brighton Housing Trust/First Base Urgent Christmas Appeal 2016. First Base is the only project for homeless men and women in the City to remain open over the Christmas and New Year Period

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Brighton-Housing-Trust5

 

 

Are you feeling a certain amount of overwhelm in your life? Are you working long hours? Saying yes to everything, yet wishing you could say no at times? Did you miss lunch… again… because the report you’re working on needs rework and there’s a deadline? Are there just not enough hours in the day, in the week to work, play, sleep and breathe?

Meet TOMM ^© as TOMM^© can help you. Let me tell you how I met TOMM^© and introduce you too. Like you, I lead a busy life, balancing family, work, friends, study, writing, speaking and all the fulfilling things I choose to do. A few months ago, I was simply doing too much… of everything. Typically the balance in my life works reasonably well. Not this time. I had a massive ‘diary fail’ when I was on 8 flights within 3 weeks. I had ‘forgotten’ how to say ‘no’ and ‘not right now’.

 

If you travel, you’ll probably be familiar with the safety instructions at the start of each flight… yes, the part where most people keep reading their work documents, book or inflight magazine. Not this time though; on one of the flights, the safety instructions shouted to me: “Please ensure you put on your own oxygen mask first, before helping anyone else with theirs.”  I thought: “Are you talking to me?!” It seemed they had a message for me and I was listening…

 

How can you help or motivate others if you’re not helping or motivated yourself?

I thought about how counter-intuitive that is and know that, were I to be travelling with my family, I’d instinctively help my children with their masks first. I also thought how useless that could be if I ran out of oxygen whilst doing it. For the first time I connected how in those over-scheduled weeks, I was helping others put their oxygen masks on each day and neglecting my own. I connected this to the behaviour of leaders I meet who want to motivate their people and teams in challenging and sometimes very difficult times, taking on too much strain. They, too, are helping others with their masks whilst neglecting their own.

 

The Oxygen Mask Metaphor

Here’s where TOMM ^©comes in: The Oxygen Mask Metaphor. I thought about what it would mean for me to put my own mask on first. I struggled for a while, thinking about how could I do that? What would it really mean?  Would it be selfish? What would I have to let go of? To what would I have to say no?  What would I change or add to my life in order to breathe more easily and therefore help others by being the very example of the change they seek also? A change had to happen so I went ahead and ‘put my own mask on first’ and that made me take action. I got through the schedule, made some simple and obvious changes, significantly reducing the feeling of overwhelm. Turned out they were pretty simple changes and involved decision-making, prioritisation and communication.

 

3 Questions

If you’re in a position of leading, motivating, communicating, influencing others, ask yourself these 3 questions:

• What would it mean for me to put on my own mask first?
• What changes do I choose to make so that I can do that?
• What are my next steps?

 

Put on your own mask first before reaching to help others with theirs. You’ll do a much better job with TOMM^©.

 

Photo credit – Grace Sansom