A Leadership Epidemic and 5 Things You Can Do About It

I am obsessed with advancing healthier systems, teams and individuals in the working world. I’m observing what I believe is an epidemic of many leaders in organizations around the globe who are climbing the ranks as subject matter and technical experts. Some don’t necessarily have the skills to be leading teams, yet they’re plunked into the chair with a circle of diverse, talented human beings surrounding them. These people have high hopes and expectations, or they’re traumatized from prior experiences and sitting in fear of what’s to come. They’re all determining if they can trust one another within minutes. Everyone, the leader in particular, is under the magnifying glass.

As an example, if a leader isn’t people-focused or collaborative but very high on IQ, driven and outcome focused, how deeply engaged will the team be? Or, if a leader has no experience leading teams and ridiculously qualified on paper, the strategy might be exceptional but the culture on the team might be flailing. Without the culture to support it, fulfilling on that amazing strategy is at risk (and so are your people).

“Innocent ignorance” is a term I like to use when referring to people who have good intentions yet make questionable choices. They know what they know, and don’t know how to choose otherwise because of what they don’t know. They’re not bad people. They also have free will to inform their future choices.

As a leader, what do you do if:

  • You know you’re qualified to get the work done, but the part involving leading people simply doesn’t come naturally?
  • You’ve gotten by this far leading with what you know, and deep down you know there’s room for improvement?
  • You’re in a leadership role yet you’ve never led an actual, multi-member team before?

 

Last year I consulted on a recognition research project for a public service entity to determine interest in a new potential program that might motivate more innovative thoughts and behaviours to address complex challenges. Of many findings that came of this work, the top insights included:

  • People care less about coffee cards and higher pay, and more about learning and growing in their work
  • They want better leaders who know how to mentor (e.g. offer advice from experience), and use a coach approach with them (e.g. looking ahead from today and how to get there using appreciative inquiry, active listening, feedback, co-creating new possibilities)
  • There is no shortage of ideas; people want to know they can voice them freely, that they will be heard, and their ideas might even go somewhere
  • People want sense of belonging, to feel valued, to experience positive self esteem
  • They want to experiment, be creative, and to experience psychological safety, including in the line of failure

 

What do you notice about these findings? I’ll share what stands out to me: people yearn to bring their whole, capable, empowered beings into their work and they need leaders who get that and will enable them to thrive. This means reflecting on what we think we know as leaders, challenging our assumptions and seeking learning to expand our capabilities. Our people are calling on us to do better. It is our duty and lies in the integrity of strong leadership.

Here are five ideas to up your ante:

Read Dare to Lead by Brene Brown.

Study what it is to step into vulnerability, courage, and more, founded on years of Brene’s research. This stuff is core, inner work to get grounded and step into “brave leader[ship] and courageous cultures”. As a leader in my network recently said while reading this book, “where the hell have I been?”.

Find a mentor you trust and respect and build a lasting relationship.

Chances are you’ve got them in your network. They’ve got lived experiences and wisdom and often pleased to share them. Many mentors simply love the gift of paying it forward with hopes you’ll do the same one day.

Get a coach, and not just any coach.

I’m a leadership coach, and before that I was coached as a senior leader for years one-on-one, in executive retreats and in teams. The impact in my journey and those around me was profound. Coaching provokes deep neurological connections that significantly advance learning. Get a coach, look to having your organization sponsor it. Talk to a few to get a sense for fit. Just make sure they’re accredited by the International Coach Federation as the global standard of excellence, abiding by the Code of Ethics for practice.

Dig into your emotional intelligence.

Unlike IQ, EQ can be developed and pivotal in advancing how you show up with your team on the basis of how your emotions impact your behavior (this also connects in with team trust). Look into Daniel Goleman’s work, the gent I like to call the “guru of emotional intelligence”. Ask me about the Emotional Quotient Inventory work I do with leaders to assess where you’re at, and co-create areas and an action plan to be developed.

What development opportunities exist around you?

Consult your partners in HR, culture, and learning and development in your organization. Find out what programs they’re offering to hone leadership skills and attributes. Some organizations have excellent internal offerings when we start looking. There are also diverse formal and informal external offerings available from universities, leadership development companies, other coaches and facilitators. For example if you simply want to use a coach approach with your team, there are reputable coaches putting on 1-3 day programs to help you get there, and I know a few I’d recommend!

I’ll stop there because we’ve got work to do. As Brene Brown says, “you can choose courage or you can choose comfort, but you cannot choose both”. As a leader your teams are calling on you to choose courage.

May you lead with fervor!

Eva

Teams Deserve Better: 7 Ways to Get Ahead of Cultural Decline

As the powerful Maya Angelou once said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

There’s much discussion these days about what employee engagement really is, about the whole person versus the worker, about the future of the workplace and great vs bad leaders. The volume is going up on the inner work needed as leaders to foster healthy teams and cultures. The onus is on leaders to dig in, ask and open to feedback, reflect, be accountable and step into a learning and growth mindset over being fixed and stuck. The cost of ‘stuck’ is just too high – lost productivity, poor engagement, talent turn-over and more.

What are some of the signs your team is disengaged, and trust is waning?

  1. When asked for thoughts or questions, people are quiet.
  2. Lack of individual accountability, neglecting to follow through on what’s asked of them.
  3. Cliques are forming and private conversations are on an incline.
  4. People are on their laptops and phones in meetings regularly, distracted and ‘checked out’.
  5. People avoid debate, ‘fierce conversations’ and creative tension.

 

In a team coaching book club I’m part of, we discussed a disconcerting trend and an epidemic – team coaching assignments are so often called upon to address team dysfunction and crisis.

So what are some things you can do to get ahead of the decline?

  1. On direction for the team, bring the team into the process, ask for input and feedback.
  2. On decisions being made, share them with transparency as much as possible.
  3. When you make mistakes, own them and share your commitment to do differently and better in future.
  4. Avoid favourites on the team; be inclusive and invite diverse perspectives and talent.
  5. Your people are more than worker bees. Take performance, learning and development seriously and show genuine, personal interest in mentoring and using a coach approach with your people – regularly (not just once a year).
  6. Invite healthy, respectful debate, feedback loops and new ideas. Create the space that help your people to be seen, heard and understood where no idea or input is bad.
  7. Set precedents on how meetings should be facilitated, the energy you bring, demonstrating ‘all-in’ presence.

I was in leadership roles for years, and I know the constant inner work it takes. It was humbling and vulnerable and equally some of the most rewarding work of my life. It was only until I started to study and develop my leadership with commitment and intention that I ‘woke up’. The work paid off – watching the people in my circles thriving.

So many teams deserve better from their leaders. The work of a great leader is uncomfortable, takes bravery, and it’s ongoing. When leaders care, people feel it and trust goes up, at the root of engaged performance and sense of belonging on teams.

If you’re seeing the signs of decline, what is your gut calling you to do differently? Getting ahead of it and doing the work can lead to a more purposeful, meaningful, fulfilling leadership path, and a rallying team at your side.

May you lead with fervor!

Eva

Four principles that guided the toughest and best work of my life – leadership.

I had my first leadership role early on in my path. Year by year, I took on more team members, more challenging assignments and got to the executive table at a young age. The more senior my role, the more responsibility for people, strategy, innovation and of course results, were piled on. Hungry for discomfort and learning, I chose all of it.

Sometimes I questioned myself: “Can I do what I signed up for? Will I pull it off?”. Yet I kept navigating situations with positive outcomes and several doses of humility along the way. Successes were harvested and hinged on openness to learning, pushing my ego to the side and stepping into vulnerability, regardless of my title.

I thought I had what I needed in my back pocket to be an effective leader. I had inspiration growing up that guided me to be people-centric, insightful and high integrity. I have always loved learning, held high standards and been a ridiculously hard worker. Plus, I was in marketing for much of my career which is rooted in driving behavior change. So, what was missing? The people side of leadership needed more of me. To go from good to stellar, I had to call on my inner superhero. I had more work to do, but not the kind that’s on a task list.

What it takes to truly engage teams rests greatly on capacities to nurture empowerment, growth, psychological safety, experimentation, sense of belonging and mutual trust. If you’re picking up on some Maslow, engaged system modelling and facets of trust in leadership, you get gold stars. To lean into these spaces means stepping into increased self-awareness, reflection, presence, accountability and intentional commitment to developing one’s whole self to flourish. Just like a garden needs water, leadership and team development do too. I watered my leadership garden with all my might and that’s when I celebrated with one of my beloved teams from the past, for we achieved 100% Engagement together.

Looking back, there are four principles that guided my leadership effectiveness.

As a leadership coach and consultant today, I am obsessed with healthy systems, teams and leaders, built with authenticity. I’m thankful to these bright spots in my path that challenged what I thought I knew all along.

1 – Tune into constructive intervention with humility. A high-performing director on a former team of mine offered me feedback, almost like an intervention.

One: “We’d love to see you be more vulnerable, to share more about who you are – it would bring us closer to you”.

Two: “I took the internal-led leadership mastery program and think you’d like it. It helps explain the difference between coaching and mentoring and I think you’d enjoy the coaching part a lot with the team in mind.”

Feedback is two-way with team members when we’re open to it. Let’s just say this conversation led to a game-changing future. To this day, I say “thank you”. You know who you are.

2 – Systematic and analytical intelligence will only take you so far. Thanks to Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, I was enlightened by the four tenets of leadership intelligence. Added to systematic and analytical forms are spiritual and emotional intelligence.

These quadrants tipped my scales in favour of working on my emotional intelligence. I wanted to increase awareness around how my emotions show up in my interactions and decision-making. Work in this area has been and continues to be pivotal. As an EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 psychometric assessment practitioner today, I firsthand see how EQ can grow within us.

3 – Make learning part of your leadership lifestyle. In a world where so many subject matter experts climb the ranks, we need more human-centric leadership. In my early days, I was one of those well-intended ladder climbers. It didn’t take long before I discovered true leadership is far greater than the mastery of my subject domain.

Later, I had the privilege of working with a couple of organizations that prioritized and invested very seriously in leadership development. I was coached and mentored. I soon committed to reading new insights and perspectives about healthy leadership regularly. I also participated in leadership learning both formal and informal. The pay-off? Beyond measure.

4 – Develop your presence. A president I reported into encouraged me to work on my presence. I resisted assuming my assertive nature and hard work had me covered, until I started looking up what executive presence was all about. He was trying to help me advance how I showed up such as the confidence I earned in others. Months later, I started to see the difference between those with and without presence. You bet I dug into advancing my presence, and still do.

Perhaps one or more of these sparks some resonance, new thinking or an additional thought. Whatever is percolating for you, I’d love to hear about it.

Yours with fervor,

Eva

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