Category Archives: Developing as a leader

More on the “are leaders born or made?” debate

Developing as a leader

After writing on the LinkedIn Leadership Think Tank on this question, I found myself coming back to it and adding…

And is there another question – what type of “leader”? The CEO of a major corporation has – in many cases – fundamentally different qualities to the kind of person who might be thought of as a thought-leader (the latter from Gandhi to Oprah Winfrey and many more besides). Commanding an army is quite unlike being Prime Minister.

So, here’s another question: do we all have the innate potential to become a leader? And if so, is there a particular kind of leader we have the potential to become, given the right commitment, dedication, learning and action (leverage)?

That old leadership chestnut: are leaders born or made?

Developing as a leader

LinkedIn has an enormous discussion group in the shape of the Leadership Think Tank.  In truth, I feel frustration when I read the number of abstract discussions about leadership and I have come close in recent weeks to signing out of the group.  I’d love to see more concrete discussion about the day-today concerns and challenges of real leaders.  And, as theory goes, I’d love to see a more robust set of discussions, rooted in deep thinking and observation of what’s actually true rather than – well, off with the fairies!

Notwithstanding my frustrations I am still a member of the group and, today, I chose to respond to the age-old question:  Are leadership qualities something you are born with?  Or can they be learnt?  There are many things to be said about this but for today, I chose to focus on the question itself.  This is what I wrote:

Is there a false dichotomy here – EITHER you are born with leadership qualities OR you learn them? What I observe is that people are born with certain qualities and yet they may not be aware of them and develop them. One reason for this is because they conclude they need to develop other qualities (as a result of family influence, education etc.). So, one thing that makes a great leader is a recognition of the qualities one has and then the development of skills, competencies etc. which support those qualities. Another way of putting this is to say that people become (“great”) leaders when they recognise, develop and leverage the leadership qualities they already possess.

How to make the tougher decisions you face

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What do you do when you face a decision that is finely balanced and with no easy answer?  This is the question my coaching client brought to our session recently.  She had been weighing the pros and cons of two very clear options and had yet to come to a decision.

Checking in with her gut instincts she already had an answer.  I invited her to rehearse the reasons for her choice as a way of grounding her decision.  She did and they seemed clear and compelling.  It was interesting, then, to hear a “six out of ten” when I asked her:  given all the reasons you outlined, what mark out of ten would you give to reflect your level of conviction that this is the right decision?  It was clear that something more was needed.

I invited her to try each option on for size.  She tried on the first option, noticing all the likely outcomes from this decision in the near-, medium- and longer-term, together with the implications for her – the work involved in following through with her decision.  This gave her new insights into the benefits and limitations of this option.  Then she tried on her second option, going through the same process.

One issue came up when she thought through her second option:  the amount of time she thought it would take in the short term to follow through with this option.  We discussed the resources she could call on so that the weight of this short-term follow-through could be spread out a little, leaving her free to focus on another – key – area of her job.  Once she had identified these new possibilities, this second option looked much more attractive in the longer term.

As a result of this process her decision – which was not the decision to which her gut instinct had initially led her – was one she could sign up to with a full conviction.  What’s more, she was clear that her next steps needed to include making a plan and gaining support in order to access the resources she needed for her short-term follow-through.

My satisfaction came from knowing that my client not only had a decision she could approach with conviction in what was, without question, a difficult situation:  she also had a process she could return to when making decisions in the future.

I wonder, what’s your process for making the tougher decisions you face?

Unleashing innate leadership potential through powerful, compassionate and authentic relationships

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As Christmas approaches, I am looking forward to taking a break.  My conversations with clients about diaries have almost gone past the stage in which the question “shall we meet before or after Christmas?” is asked.

There are many things I shall look back on in 2010 – and many things I am looking forward to in 2011.  This includes looking back on the work I have done this year to clarify my offering to clients.  My aim has been to make it increasingly easy for those people and organisations to find me to whom I am best suited to contribute.

Most recently I have been preparing an update of my profile on LinkedIn.  This is what I have included – so far:

Dorothy Nesbit

Leadership Coach, unleashing innate leadership potential through powerful, compassionate and authentic relationships.

Summary

Are you a successful senior leader who’s striving to fulfil your potential? Do you want dramatically to increase your contribution to your organisation?

It’s lonely at the top. Everyone looks to you for the answers and your actions are under scrutiny from every direction. At times, wracked with self doubt, you are your own worst critic. Wearing the “mask” of leadership, trying to keep up with your own view of what it takes to be a great leader – it’s hard work and exhausting.

A passionate leadership coach, I love to team up with talented and successful executives to liberate their innate potential and achieve more with less effort. My clients build powerful and authentic relationships with themselves and with others as a springboard for increasing their contribution to their organisation.

If you recognise the need to adjust your approach and you need help with the “how”, I’m your coach.

My signature coaching approach will leave you:

• With clarity and confidence about the role you want to play;
• Equipped to play your role with growing ease, authenticity and self-mastery;
• Inspired and motivated to deliver improved business outcomes.

My approach is uniquely effective because I grow and develop powerful, compassionate and authentic relationships, unleashing and cultivating innate leadership potential.

I wonder, as you read this description, what do you learn about the people with whom I most enjoy working in coaching partnership?





Giving feedback: what do you do when someone just isn’t getting it?

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What can you do when you’ve given someone feedback and they’re just not getting it?  This is a common dilemma at work and opens up two possibilities.  The first is to adjust your approach to giving feedback until you’ve been successful in giving your feedback in a way which can be heard and understood.  The second is to take your frustration elsewhere – to share it with your filing cabinet, colleagues, spouse or pubmates, for example.  Often, the first option is the most difficult.  At the same time, when we give feedback we do so for a reason – there’s something we want to change as a result.

Recently a colleague from the world of nonviolent communication (or NVC) highlighted a brief video on YouTube of coaching by Miki Kashtan* in how to say “no” when someone wants your time at work.  Miki’s coaching helps the person wanting to give feedback whilst also helping to preserve the dignity of the person receiving the feedback.  When we get it right, it’s not just that our feedback is heard and understood:  both parties have new insights which they can apply across their lives, they understand each other better and their sense of trust and connection is preserved and maybe deepened, too.

For me, Miki’s coaching illustrates some common ways we use language and their limitations.  One of these is to speak generally when we give feedback rather than to highlight specific examples.  This can have the effect of making it hard for the recipient to hear and understand our feedback whilst at the same time carrying the risk of making a statement about the person rather than about specific behaviours which didn’t work for the giver of feedback on particular occasions.  The person receiving feedback can be left with an uneasy feeling as they absorb the message that they’ve “done something wrong” and maybe even the message that there’s “something wrong with them” without being able to understand the message and its implications.

A second way in which we commonly use language when we give feedback is to mix together the other person’s behaviour and our response to that behaviour.  “You talk too much” would be one example:  you only need to scratch the surface of this statement a little to realise that we don’t know how much a person talks when they “talk too much” though we can infer that the person giving the feedback is not enjoying it.  So common is this language pattern that most of us would not even notice it.

Perhaps Miki’s brief video (just ten minutes long) illustrates something else, too.  Beneath the label “nonviolent communication” – a label that can seem off-putting to some – lie both sound thinking and practical alternatives to aspects of communicating in our culture which limit the results we can achieve.

*Miki is co-founder and senior trainer at BayNVC in Oakland, CA, USA, host of the Conflict Hotline on KPFA radio, and for several years coordinator of the global CNVC project on applying NVC to social change.

Leadership and the Anatomy of the Spirit

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It’s Friday night in the run-up to a concert.  Tutti night, when the chorus and orchestra get together for the first time to prepare for a concert on Sunday.  Even though I know there won’t be much down-time in this particular rehearsal, I have my book with me in the hope that I might be able to continue my reading.  Part-way through the rehearsal one of my colleagues leans over and asks to take a look.  I send the book down the row, marking a page I think might be of particular interest.  I don’t see it for the remainder of the rehearsal.  When it comes back she comments:  “It should be essential reading”.

The book’s author, Caroline Myss, is – it seems to me – an extraordinary woman who has become what is known as a “medical intuitive”.  With very little information about the individuals concerned, Myss found she could diagnose illnesses and pinpoint the causes of those illnesses and the energetic or spiritual challenges faced by the individuals concerned.  It wasn’t always that way.  In the preface to her book she charts her transition from newspaper journalist to theology student to founder of Stillpoint publishing company to medical intuitive.  This latter is not something she sought out.  Her initial experiences in this area left her confused and a little scared and it was a while before she met C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D and began to support her intuitive abilities with an intensive study with him of the physical anatomy of the human body.

In her book, Anatomy of the Spirit:  The Seven Stages of Power and Healing, Myss sets out to teach the reader the language of energy with which she works, offering a summation of her fourteen years of research into anatomy and intuition, body and mind, spirit and power.  She draws on a number of spiritual traditions including the Hinda chakra, the Christian sacraments and the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life to present a new view of how the body and spirit work together.  In reading Myss’ book, I was fascinated by the model she outlines, charting the energetic content of each chakra, its location, its energy connection to the emotional/mental body, primary fears, primary strengths, sacred truths and more.  This is a map of the spiritual challenges we face in our lives in which Myss also shares many stories from her work which illustrate the implications of embracing – or not – those essential human challenges.

For those already familiar with the world of energy and comfortable with the language of the spirit, Myss’ book is a fascinating read and a reference to return to again and again.  At the same time, Myss’ book is not only for the spiritual seeker.  In the often more guarded language of the business world, Myss is addressing aspects of what is often called emotional intelligence.  Many books for example, (including Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards and more recently Daniel Pink’s Drive:  The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) highlight research findings which demonstrate unequivocally that we give our best performance when we are driven by our own intrinsic motivation rather than by external punishment and reward.  In the language of the spirit this is about our intuition and inner guidance – something Myss covers amply throughout this book.

As I read what I have written so far, I also think of the need for leaders to be able to uderstand themselves, to understand others and to understand the context in which they work – the organisational and wider culture.  I think of how often my own work as executive coach supports individuals in facing the very challenges Myss outlines in this book:  what would it mean for leaders to be able to support themselves and others in the same way?  Myss’ book offers powerful and intriguing insights for the leader from the world of (as it has become known) alternative medicine.

PS  Just to let you know, as a member of Amazon Associates UK, I shall receive a referral fee for any books you buy using the links in this posting.

On the challenges of “being the change”

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Many times, Mahatma Gandhi invited people to “be the change you want to see in the world”.  Gandhi pioneered satyagraha, or the resistance of tyranny through mass civil disobedience.  As much as he was firm in his pursuit of the rights of Indian people, Gandhi was also committed to total nonviolence.  Gandhi’s invitation to “be the change” brings us back to some essential truths.  Why should others embody ways of being that we ourselves do not embody?  And anyway, the truth is, we cannot change the others, we can only change ourselves.

For me, understanding these truths has been an important part of what brought me to coaching – to being a coach. And like peeling the layers of an onion, I find that every time I reach one new frontier in my learning another one opens up. And yes, from time to time, life sends a reminder that I’m not there yet. This is how it was last week.

On Tuesday, in conversation with person A, I listened to her as she expressed a view I didn’t share and said it didn’t resonate with me.  When she repeated it I said I found it more helpful to look at it differently and shared my thinking.  When she repeated it a third time I found my emotions were triggered.  Our conversation turned from the matter in hand to the way we were interacting with each other.

On Wednesday, I was sitting next to person B’s wife on the London Underground as, standing in front of us both,  he told her how much he disliked the English.  As the people around him began to exchange glances at each other I felt the discomfort rising in me as I listened to him talk and talk and talk… I was grateful when, eventually, two women claiming to be off-duty officers invited him to leave the train.

On Thursday, I finally got round to responding to an e-mail on a forum for followers of nonviolent communication from person C.  It was an e-mail I hadn’t enjoyed reading and I was concerned for the person she’s written it to as well as concerned about its effect on the wider group.  I decided to share my concerns openly and to invite a conversation amongst group members.

As the week progressed I found myself reflecting more and more on what was going on in me in response to all these exeriences.  Following each experience I recognised just how much I was putting the focus of my attention on the other person.  Surely person A should hear and respect me when I shared with her that I simply didn’t share her view – and let it go!  Surely person B should know in advance that talking about how much you dislike the English on the London Underground was going to offend people and cause an argument!  Surely person C should see that her e-mail – on a forum for students of nonviolence – was at odds with some of the most fundamental teachings we seek to follow!  Even as I write I feel the seductive lure of putting the other person in the wrong.

Catching myself in this way of thinking I remind myself that violence – and nonviolence – begins on the inside, with our thoughts and feelings.  Even if we follow all the steps that we can identify en route to nonviolence, if we do so from a place of wanting to be right, we fuel violence in the world.  Thinking in this way I am not being the change I want to see in the world.  This is not to say that I would want to hold back from expressing a different view or making a request of the other person.  Rather, this is to recognise that I would like to do so whilst accepting that, like me, they are where they are, doing the best they know how in a given moment.

And as my perspective starts to shift, I see reasons to be grateful to these people, each and every one.  For my experiences with them are a reminder of my own aspirations, to be able to respond to behaviours I don’t enjoy, to express my needs and to make requests of others whilst accepting them fully as my brothers and sisters in this world – and whilst accepting their behaviour as OK, the best way they know how to meet their needs at a given point in time.  What’s more, my experiences are a reminder that I am on my way – and still not there yet.

The dance of acceptance – at work

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What does it mean to “see” another and to “be seen”?  How do we know when we are being seen?  And how does this link to meeting our need for acceptance?  Last week I wrote a posting in which I attempted to address these questions and to describe what I called the “dance of acceptance”.  But what of the dance of acceptance at work?

The person who has not yet learnt to accept him- (or her-) self will do his best to put on a good face at work.  He’ll think hard about what others want to see and do his best to deliver against his best understanding.  At the same time, his best understanding and its execution may be poor because of the great fear he has of asking what’s needed or – worse still – of asking for feedback about how he’s doing in practice.  (One of the reasons I know this is because I was this person earlier in my career).

If he’s successful in covering his tracks he risks being seen as arrogant by others who are taken in by his brilliant facade.  More likely others will see all sorts of clues which creep out around the edges.  Either way, the effort it will cost him will be significant – and draining.

This person will have a manager and may be a manager.  As a manager he may look to blame others for anything that goes wrong – heaven forbid that any sign of imperfection should end up on his desk!  Whilst he’s managing his own fears his staff may develop high levels of anxiety in their turn.  He may be seen as a bully.

If he is lucky, his manager may have a finely honed level of self acceptance such that he is not, in turn, on the receiving end of his own approach.  Such a manager may well perceive the root cause of behaviours that are not serving him or helpful to the business.  He may be able to strike the delicate balance between accepting him as a person and managing his behaviour – this depends on his manager’s ability to see beyond the current manifestations of his fears and to trust to his learning and progress.

Ultimately, even if his manager has to address his behaviour and their impact on the performance of his team, he will be able to do so from a place of acceptance.  Such a manager is likely to say:

There are some problems with your performance at this time and I need to address these with you.  I’m not sure whether you’re in the right job and need some learning and support or whether you’re in the wrong job and need to move on to one that suits you better.  Either way, it’s my job to help you to find this out and to support you in getting to a point where you are performing in your job.  It may be this job, it may be another job.  I’m here to support you.

In my years of interviewing leaders for jobs or as part of research into what makes the most effective leaders it’s rare that I come across a leader who can separate the man (or woman) from his (or her) performance in this way.

This is just one example of the dance of acceptance in the workplace.   

Coming alive

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“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive.
And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Howard Thurman

I am savouring this quote this morning, which speaks to so much that I hold to be true.

Perhaps one of the most important decisions we make in our lives is this:  do we act in the belief that we need to shape ourselves to what the world wants if we are to meet our needs, including our most fundamental needs for safety and survival, or do we act in the belief that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we are called to contribute to this larger whole and will be supported and sustained as we explore and manifest our greater contribution?

As I write I reflect on the many men and women I have interviewed over the years to assess their suitability for senior leadership roles.  There are some who act in the awareness of this larger whole and of the contribution they are called to make.  Their energy is infectious – engaging and inspiring.  These are the men and women I feel drawn to spend time with.

As a coach to senior leaders, I notice how much I feel drawn to work in partnership with those men and women who, in some way, are manifesting the energy which might be called the living energy of their true self.  It could be that they are already in touch with this energy or it might be that this energy is shining through them despite their best efforts to overlook it.  Still, it is there.  How wonderful to work in partnership with clients as they learn to connect with their inner wisdom and guidance – to trust themselves – and in this way to uncover their true path.

And what about you?  It’s possible that these words have no resonance for you – perhaps you have already ceased to read.  Maybe you have questions, such as “how can I know that one or another belief is true?”  The answer is – you can’t.  Each belief is just a belief.  And given that it is just a belief, you might as well choose the belief that serves you best, right now, in this moment.

And in case you’re wondering which belief to choose I offer you this question to guide you:  which belief is most likely to help you to come alive?

Being a great leader starts with being yourself

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Recently, I amended the brief description that sits under the heading “about me” at the top of my blog to read:

Being a great leader starts with being yourself. I am a holistic coach to senior leaders. I help men and women in senior leadership positions find and walk their true paths in line with natural laws – what works.

This statement reflects my growing understanding of my niche – those clients with whom I most enjoy working, those clients with whom I do my best work.

Perhaps there’s a paradox that sits underneath this statement.  On the one hand, I have been involved over the years in a great deal of research into what makes for the most outstanding leaders.  This research, which had been reflected by Goleman in his books The New Leaders and Working with Emotional Intelligence suggests that there is a common recipe for all leaders and, within organisations, a variation on this recipe which is distinct for a particular organisation.  A common criticism made of this work is that this suggests the “cookie cutter” leader – and we can all see that leaders vary enormously in their personal style and effectiveness.
 
On the other hand, it’s my view that the path to personal effectiveness – mastery – as a leader is a highly personal path which varies enormously from person to person.  It involves understanding and accepting oneself as well as making adjustments to improve effectiveness.  The changes we make don’t stick unless they are congruent and aligned to who we are and to what we want.  This is why I enjoy my work so much – because I take great pleasure in supporting the path of the individual towards his or her personal recipe for success.
 
There is another paradox here.  Oftentimes, when organisations are involved in discussing the competencies they most yearn to see in their leaders there is one that comes up again and again, labelled as “integrity” or “honesty”.  At the same time, many people walk through their careers in the belief that they need to “play the part” in order to succeed.  At best, this reflects insight into what does and doesn’t work in a particular organisation and an informed choice to work in ways that are effective.  At worst it is the stuff of deep personal stress as we worry that we will not be fully accepted in the workplace unless we play our part well. 
 
And the bottom line is this:  no matter how hard we try, we don’t get to hide.  Our true self creeps out around the edges.  If we have a level of self mastery this can be a great gift to self and others because we all have skills, competencies and other attributes that are of great value in the world of work if only we can find and claim our rightful place.  On the other hand, as long as we are trying to be someone we are not we may struggle to succeed, for the effort of maintaining the facade is great and ultimately ineffective.  It’s just as well that the journey to authenticity and self mastery, whilst challenging and at times painful on the one hand, is also liberating for ourselves and for those we lead on the other – a “win, win” all round.
 
I wonder, to what extent would you describe yourself as bringing your best self to work?  As authentic?  As knowing what works?  A “mark out of ten” will give you a crude measure of your own authenticity in the workplace. 
 
PS Just to let you know, as a member of Amazon Associates UK, I shall receive a referral fee for any books you buy using the links in this posting.