Leadership is everything you do

One of the key questions my clients bring to the table is ‘when do I find time to lead’? When, between the meetings, 1:1s, the busy work, the client facing bit, the keeping the whole thing afloat and aligned to a vision… when do you have time to lead. You’re so busy transacting, fire fighting, problem solving and dealing with the general day to day that ‘leadership’ falls to the bottom of the list.

The answer is always the same…

leadership is everything you do.

When you lead a team, and a business, every move you make is one of leadership. Every conversation you have, from the all-hands, state of the nation or call to arms addresses to the conversation at the sink in the toilets and everything in between.

Your team are looking to you for guidance, for role modelling, for the model of success – ALL THE TIME.

You might find that completely terrifying or maybe utterly liberating. Either way, it’s potentially a huge shift in mindset that needs to come with some reflection and reassessment.

When you’re playing a senior role in a growing business it’s usually because you’re bloody good at what you do. You wouldn’t be where you are without being a high achiever – and you know that you can scratch the achievement itch by doing what you know you’re good at…getting stuff done.

But here’s the rub - that doesn’t always equate to brilliant leadership.

In a company growing quickly its leader, you, needs to feel comfortable learning and growing ahead of the organisation. You need to feel confident in your ability to build a bigger, stronger team that can keep pace with the rate of change happening around you. And you need to make sure you’re not compounding the various challenges that come with fast growth by hiding behind the busy work.

When you’re confident about your leadership style and ability, something truly magical happens. The door is opened to a world of clarity, focus and ease. When you’re able to engage and energise a team around a common purpose, you’ll find a new level of space and creativity. Allowing you to step into, and own, your leadership space to define the things that matter and lead with intentionality and show-stopping visibility.

The ripple effect

If you want to have impact that resonates far beyond your physical presence and into the hearts and minds of people within and beyond your business - your direct reports, their teams, your suppliers, customers and community – then leadership is key.

It needs to move to the top of your list.

Having the right sort of impact actually takes away a lot of the work you’re currently hiding in. This sort of impact improves decision making, confidence, prioritisation, motivation and ultimately the bottom line.

But it’s also requires some honesty and reassessment. It might make you question what your role is now.

What’s reassuring is that once you fully embrace this ‘all-in’ way of thinking, it makes everything feel easier, clearer, calmer and makes things flow.

This kind of leadership comes from two things.

1 - the realisation that leadership is not something else to do – it’s who you are and how you behave.

2 – the commitment to developing yourself to be the best version of a leader that you can possibly be.

Getting it right will make all the difference to how your business runs.

Leadership = culture

Once you understand that leadership is everything you do, and you become comfortable with it, you start to show up in a completely different way.

Leaders who get it wrong appear inconsistent, sometimes ‘on it’, sometimes detached or different. At worst they become known as Jekyll and Hyde characters.

I worked for one of these people once. He had a fantastic, and incredibly charismatic leadership persona when he switched it on but behind closed doors, when he let his guard down, he was inconsistent and would undermine his leadership by becoming a completely different (and not very nice) character. This would catch people off guard as they became more senior and were let into his inner circle.

The result was an enormous lack of trust and a split organisation. We had an overt culture, one of openness and achievement and a sub-culture of arse covering and whispering in corners. And as he was at the top, it all started with him.

Having reflected on this from my current position, it’s clear where the issues were. It was his first GM role and he was completely out of his depth. He wasn’t getting the support he needed and his priorities were wrong. He put a huge amount of energy into all the wrong things. As a result, the shadow he cast was huge, and very dark.

This is one of the key experiences in my career that makes me want to help people be brilliant leaders. I don’t want anyone to go through what I did working for him. And I don’t want anyone to go through what I’m sure was an incredibly stressful time for him at the top too.

Ultimately the business we were in started to fail and I’m sure with the right leadership in place, at all levels it would have stood a far better chance.

When leadership is done well, the energy is in the right place

Great leaders are clear on who they are, and how they need to show up. Their value set matches that of the mission, vision and purpose they are trying to achieve. This allows them to be consistent and allows others to know where they stand.

This in turn creates a culture of trust and openness, one of experimentation and innovation.

Great leaders understand that trust is achieved, not by what they say they’ll do but what they actually do. Not who they say they are but who they really are. They are open to feedback and keen to increase their self-awareness to ensure they are in alignment with how they want to be perceived.

It’s not just your team

Seeing leadership from this point of view means you realise that leading well isn’t just about your team or direct reports. It’s about how you interact with everyone, at every point. How you lead upwards with your board or investors. How you lead conversations with your customers. How you influence your suppliers. How you lead peers and how you show up in meetings. You have a leadership role to play with every stakeholder you have because you need to influence every single one.

Thinking of things from this point of view means your energy becomes very different. You are active rather than passive. A player rather than a passenger. You lead the agenda but you’re also willing to give other people the space they need to learn and grow.

I once worked with an incredibly bright woman who was within a hair’s breadth of promotion into the role of commercial director. She was well thought of, enormously popular with clients, hitting her numbers consistently and increasingly frustrated that she continued to be told ‘not yet’. The people she worked for weren’t able to articulate why but they were clear that she wasn’t seen as ‘ready’ for the role.

It really didn’t seem as though it was ‘what’ she was achieving that was the problem so we started to unpack how she was operating within the team. As a long standing, and very pivotal, member of a team that had been through the start-up journey together she had carved out a role as the conduit for lots of information… she was the go-to for everything including ALL gossip. If anyone wanted to know what was going on, she was the one to go to – no matter the subject. As strong a position that gave her within the business from a social point of view it very much weakened her potential as a leader. Although she was incredibly popular with graduates and junior members of the team, she was seen as capable of indiscretion and immaturity by the people who mattered.

Leadership was very much something she did by choice rather than a consistent mindset and it wasn’t doing her any favours. Once we established this, we were able to be crystal clear on her strengths and work out a simple plan to close the gaps. She was promoted within 3 months.

So are we talking about a leadership brand?

I’m not a huge fan of the term ‘leadership brand’ but it exists for a really good reason. It’s a neat way to wrap up all of the things you need to get crystal clear on in order to have the impact you want.

Branding is all about managing the perception you create for the people you want to influence. And that’s exactly how you need to think about how you come across as a leader.

Great leaders understand what makes them who they are. They understand their core values and their natural strengths. They are clear on their purpose and how it informs the vision they have for their business and the decisions they make as part of that.

As Dolly Parton so brilliantly put it…

“Figure out who you are. Then do it on purpose.”

Many a leader has come unstuck trying to do the opposite. As soon as the pressure’s on it’s difficult not to revert to type if you’re trying to ‘act’ like the leader you want to be.

Great leaders also understand that perception is reality. It’s not enough to assume that if you’re aligned and clear yourself that others will see things in the same way. How you come across to the people that matter and the effect that has on the things they do is enormously important and crucial to understand.

The final piece of the jigsaw is to become intimate with your development areas. Especially in relation to what you want to achieve. They are usually your natural tendencies, especially under pressure, that hold you, and potentially your team and your business back.

Once you have clarity on these three things you can start to work in a far more aligned, authentic way. It will feel easier and you’ll experience far less resistance.

It’s not always an easy thing to do on your own. I often work with people for over a year to get this stuff right. It takes time to get clear on who you really are as a leader and to identify and then work on the gaps to where you want to be.

This all sounds a bit serious

In the fast growth or scaling businesses I work with, I tend to coach two types of people. Founders and CEOs who are running this size of business for the first time, or top talent from bigger organisations who made the leap into more senior roles somewhere smaller.

The gap for most of these people is either deep or broad experience at director or board level.

As they are coming to the realisation that they are now carrying a significant weight of leadership responsibility they are also figuring out that they need to ‘grow up’.

But it’s sometimes their childlike optimism and energy that led to their success in the first place. It’s also what brought them into this more entrepreneurial world.

So how do you become the leader you want whilst maintaining that all important sense of self, without letting the responsibility and accountability crush the spirit that led you on this quest.

When you work on really understanding yourself, your core values and natural leadership strengths your leadership style becomes about galvanising who you are and making it work for you in a leadership context rather than changing your whole way of being.

Having this clarity allows you to be consistent, genuine and authentic. It actually allows you the freedom to be playful and curious with new ideas and open with people about who you are. It brings you closer to the team not further away.

When you think about leadership in this way it becomes anything but boring. It becomes a way of bringing everything together to give you more of the things that you want in your business.

What could be better?