Are you getting your kicks in all the wrong places?
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A few weeks ago I talked about how to how important your energy is to how your business runs. It won’t come as any surprise that how you feel about your work has a massive impact on how energised you feel.
If this is something you’re interested in, it’s worth investing some time in doing a simple energy audit for yourself. Challenge yourself to pay attention to the things that energise you in your day and the things that feel like they drain you. Make a note of this for a few days and see what it throws up.
I do this work with my clients a lot. And frequently it’s the same thing that shows up again and again.
A lot of the senior leaders I work with find they’re low energy because, as natural high achievers, they get their buzz from doing things and getting results. They find that rather than building a whole list of things that drain them, they actually end up feeling as though they just don’t have a very big list of things that energise them.
As you get towards the top of any organisation, two things happen. Firstly you now have a team who are eager to do things and get results themselves and secondly the external validation that tells you you’re doing well, and that high achievers thrive on, starts to diminish.
As you get higher up, there’s also an expectation that your involvement in the day to day should decrease. What’s more, as you step out of the functional lines of command, suddenly there’s no one cheering you on any more.
Once you reach the top of the tree all of this becomes even more acute. You no longer even have peers. In fact you can start to feel as though you have all the responsibility with none of the control. Multiply that by a lack of tangible results that you feel you’ve achieved yourself and you may start to feel like you’re missing that buzz.
A lot of leaders try to step back down into the detail in an attempt to regain this control involvement and buzz and sometimes to prove to themselves, and others, that they still have value to add.
If you get your kicks in the scrappy, the hustle, the point proving, then you might find yourself feeling low energy and struggling to be creative as the need for longer term bigger picture thinking increases.
If you’re getting push back from your team because you’re getting too involved it can be common to feel as though you’re struggling to know exactly what your job is or how you can do well at it.
None of this is energising. So what do you do about it?
The best CEOs are able to master all of this and get comfortable with the inevitable peaks and troughs that exist in their business. They learn to thrive on giving clarity, envisioning and empowering a team and achieving through others. They’re able to spot the energy dips in their team as well as themselves and get back on track quickly. They focus on how to develop leadership skills that meet the challenge.
To do this, you need show up consistently and lead visibly - demonstrating curiosity in how you can help your team best succeed. You need to focus on removing barriers and providing resources, listening intently to what your team’s needs are and focus on creating the conditions for success.
But this isn’t always easy. Working out how to develop leadership skills will be happening on the job. Many CEOs I work with feel this as a massive dip in confidence and it can make them question whether they even want the job.
It can simply be the luck of the draw to find out you’re good at leading senior leaders. It’s my personal view that this is why the majority of CEOs don’t last the distance.
So how do you avoid it? And how do you deal with it once it’s happening?
It’s here that I’ve found coaching can add an enormous amount of value. It's definitely where I'm seeing the strongest 'before and after' impact in my own practice.
My approach to leadership development in this space particularly focusses on finding out who you are, and leading from within, not trying to copy another approach or to embody a leader you’ve looked up to. It's about understanding your values and beliefs and what they mean for you as a leader and for your team.
Allowing you to be yourself, and seeing the strength in that is crucial to building resilience, strength and confidence whilst you learn to lean in to this different way of working and getting your kicks! Bolstered with a toolbox of more tangible leadership skills you can underpin this more intentional approach and the impact is huge.
You will find yourself naturally far more energised for the journey at hand.
If you’d like to explore I could support you to step out of the day to day and reflect on where you can have the biggest impact in your business, why not drop me a line on rebecca@rebeccamorley.co.uk
