3 reasons you’re not making the impact you want in your leadership role
You might have 101 excuses why your operational performance / finances / staff morale / customer satisfaction / reputation aren’t going the way you would like.
But really there are only three reasons:
Strategy - having an organisational strategy is all well and good, but if you don’t have clarity in your personal leadership strategy - if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve as a leader - how will you expect others to follow?
Self-leadership - like an organisation has it’s own values and behaviours, to achieve your personal leadership strategy you need to know what your leadership style will look like. Being able to define what you stand for, knowing how you’ll stay in touch with what’s happening, providing clarity in how you organise and manage yourself (and others), how you create alignment across your teams, setting and sticking to your boundaries … these are all often overlooked.
Communication - the golden thread that pulls everything together. It’s the ‘how’ you convey your strategy and self-leadership as part of the day-to-day execution of your role. Demonstrating clarity in your message, knowing who you need to engage with, having a rhythm of communications and engagement in order to build trust and reliability.
That's it.
If you don’t have these three elements nailed as a leader then you’re going to struggle.
And you see this when leaders fail.
It’s usually because:
a) they’ve not taken people with them to deliver their vision and strategy
b) they’re chaotic in they way they manage themselves and their work, creating mistrust and disruption amongst their people
c) and this shows up through their communications or the lack of it - what they do (or don’t do), how it is (or isn’t) said, whether they demonstrate empathy, listening, compassion, trust, and if they show vulnerability.
Strategy / self-leadership / communication are so interlinked that to have a weakness in one area will impact the other two.
That’s why in the coaching and communications strategy work I do with clients, our focus will always come back to this.
So if you’ve not been having the right impact - if your metrics are going in the wrong direction, if people aren’t getting behind your vision, or if your Board or key external stakeholders are questioning your value - you need to troubleshoot what the real issue is.
If you want a safe space to explore the challenges in your leadership approach and to develop a 90day plan to transform the impact you make in your organisation book in for a free consultation call.