Congratulations, you made it to the top! Years of honest hard work, diligence and sincerity have paid off, and now you are either a member of the C-suite or the CEO.
You have either already met your personal financial goals or are well on the way to doing so. The external trappings of your success are all too visible. In short, you are a leader, you are successful and you should be happy, right?
Well, not so fast. Read each of the following statements and think carefully. Then make a mental check mark to it if it applies to you:
• One of your biggest problems is getting and retaining the right top talent. Many of your key positions are staffed by people who are not the best fit for the role. You also have “divas” who either think no end of themselves or don’t want to work too hard, or both. When you try to give them feedback, you are accused of not making enough effort to understand their point of view. The boss is always wrong.
• If you listen to all, the feedback and advice you get, you end up abandoning your out-of-the-box ideas without giving them a fair chance. If you persist despite the feedback, you are called autocratic and dictatorial.
• If you use an inclusive style of leadership as your default, people get too comfortable, begin to take you for granted, and performance becomes sub-optimal.
• There is constant pressure to have all the answers, fix what is wrong, and produce financial results in a highly competitive and fast changing environment. The sheer amount of information and advice available on how to lead an organisation to maximum success is overwhelming.
• Neither your employees nor your board of directors see the full picture of the challenges you juggle all the time, yet they are quick to form opinions about your performance as a leader.
• Your organisation is doing well, but you feel it is not achieving its full potential. While people happily second-guess your every move, you have no one to vent your frustrations to.
• In the age of social media, it is easy for anyone to tarnish the reputation of others. As a leader, every word you speak and each step you take can be misinterpreted and broadcasted.
• You wish you had a less contentious relationship with your board and other stakeholders. Whatever the reasons, the lack of support is draining yet you need to have them as strategic allies.
• You have worked hard to get to where you are now, but beginning to question what life is all about, and what’s next for you.
If several of the above challenges apply to you, you are not alone. There is hardly any C-suite person that does not struggle with at least some of these.
When we ask them what they think the solution might be, very often we are told that that it might be time for them to either look for another job, go entrepreneurial, or to call it a day altogether.
Very often when someone changes a job or profession for reasons similar to the statements above, one finds himself in the same position in the next venture.
So what is the long-term solution? We have observed that those who manage to successfully navigate through the toughest of personal and organisational challenges have usually mastered eight important transitions.
1. From blissful unawareness to emotional self-awareness.
Enough has been said about the virtues of emotional intelligence, and chances are you’ve taken an EQ assessment or two already. EQ training has been making the rounds in corporate leadership programmes for quite a while now, yet it is amazing how few people can clearly articulate their deeply held values.
A mismatch between one of our values and the situation at hand makes us feel a negative emotion like fear, anger or sadness, and a match makes us feel happy and at peace. So unless we fully understand our values, we cannot recognise and understand our emotions. Without the ability to recognise and understand our emotions, we cannot channel our emotional energy towards the right direction.
2. From problem solving to pursuing a purpose.
Happiness, success and even leadership are defined in terms of money, power, title and position. Early in life, most people learn some simple lessons from their parents like “work hard, produce results and you shall be successful,” or, “if you comply with what we ask of you, we will reward you”.
In essence, right from when we are young, we learn that the best way to succeed in life is to do as we are told. Once we become adults, we use the same ethics (of hard work and compliance) in our working lives and become good problem solvers.
The formula works quite well and some of us eventually find ourselves in the C-suite. But despite all the external markings of success, we sometimes feel unfulfilled. Why? Because along the way, we miss a critical ingredient of success, happiness and leadership — a clear purpose over and above our own economic wellbeing.
People who find true happiness, success and leadership first understand the “why” of their existence through their values as explained above, then use that knowledge to determine a larger purpose for themselves. Unfortunately, most self-help and leadership literature largely ignores the inner “why” and “what”, and focuses instead on over the surface skills — the “how.
3. From bland to authentic communication.
Leadership is about convincing and motivating people to join you in achieving your purpose. They create a sense of shared purpose. In this sense, they maximise the emotional energy of their people.
One tool they use to do so is authentic and powerful communication. Bosses who don’t have clarity of purpose simply communicate goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) without deep passion about the why and the what. Accordingly, instead of inspired followership, they get just compliance from their people.
4. From a competitive to collaborative mindset.
A typical problem solver has the mindset of winning as much as possible. He sees life as full of zero sum game and believes that in order for him to win; someone else will have to lose. So he does his best to avoid conflict.
A real leader who has done the inner work of creating values and purpose clarity usually understands that not only is conflict an unavoidable part of life, it is a pre-requisite to creating the best possible future.
The key to developing a collaborative mindset lies in understanding that in most conflict situations both parties can get exactly what they want if they reframe the problem from competitive to collaborative.
5. From managing to inspiring performance.
Typical problem solving bosses manage the performance of their subordinates. They set goals at the beginning of each year, provide tools to get the job done, give feedback regularly, evaluate performance once or twice a year, and give rewards/compensation at the end of the year as appropriate.
On the face of it, nothing seems wrong here.
But the best “purpose and values leaders” do more. They ‘inspire’ performance by aligning the strengths, aspirations, purpose and values of each of their people with the shared bigger picture.
6. From anger and resentment to forgiveness.
The final personal orientation transition is to develop the habit of forgiving. They do not lose energy on revenge, anger and blame because they understand that ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind’,
7. From organisational performance to vision.
Having successfully made the above six personal orientation transitions, the best leaders apply similar principles while leading the organisations they head. The first is to shift from simply establishing organisational targets to shaping a vision and mission for the organisation.
8. From reactive to proactive organisational development.
Just as they shape a higher mission and vision for their organisation, the best leaders take control of developing their organisation’s core capabilities.
Of the original 500 companies that made it in the first Fortune 500 list in 1955, only 71 remained in 2008. The enduring 71 include names like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, Ford, General Motors and Exxon. What did these companies do differently? They built organisational cultures that created leaders at all levels.
Some of these companies hit rock bottom at some point in their history, but their bones and nerves (organisational architecture and culture) were strong enough to enable them to bounce back.
There is no immunity from the loneliness and challenges that come with C-suite leadership. Honestly assess if you have successfully made the above eight transitions.
It is never too late to begin the journey of self-reflection.
— The writer is the CEO of Iclif Leadership & Governance Centre. He will be lecturing on Senior Leadership Dilemmas at Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government on September 25.
