Do you feel like you’re walking the leadership tightrope?
And how to create your safety net
As leaders, it is tempting to try to control everything. After all you are accountable for results; yours is the head that could roll should performance soften. The desire to tighten oversight or control is understandable but it’s the worst thing you can do.
Instead, you need to hold the right control and accountability and release the rest to your team.
Getting the levels of control and accountability right can feel like you are walking a tightrope, without a safety net. And getting the balance wrong can be catastrophic for your business:
- Keeping too much control will disempower your teams, create conflict, tarnish your leadership reputation, and leave you ultimately burnt out.
- Letting go of too much control will cause chaos, blurring responsibilities, create conflict and tarnish your leadership reputation.
The corrections you make when it comes to control and accountability will have a significant impact on your ability to deliver against the business objectives.
The reality is that you simply cannot do everything. You cannot take on all the leadership tasks and operational work. There is not enough time in the day, the week, the month, or the year. You will be the bottleneck in your business if you are trying to do this.
The Role of the Leader
Your role as the leader is to:
- Set and align the strategic direction
- Remove obstacles and barriers for your teams,
- Identify and curate strategic opportunities for the business
- Manage conflicts that will derail the business.
Your perspective should be a balance between long-term, outward looking for risks and opportunities and understanding where the business is today and enabling current performance:
If you spend too much time with an inward focus you will not only destroy the ability to operate independent of you, but you will also likely miss out on identifying externally driven risks and opportunities.
If you spend too much time with an outward focus, you will lose tough with what is really happening in the business and will be unable to make the best decisions for your business.
Your intention should be to have your teams operate independently of you but aligned to your vision and goals for the business. This takes trust, communication, alignment, and an understanding that you may oversee a business, but you lead people.
Trust
You have to trust in yourself and your people. You have to trust that you are the right person for this leadership job. And that the people on your executive team are the right people for their jobs.
As much as you trust you own competency, experience, and skills, you have to trust their competency, experience, and skills to the same degree.
As much as trust is earned, as the leader you may have to invest in the trust of your team before it is fully earned. This will inspire trust in you.
Communication
Open, honest, transparent communication is the cornerstone of building trust. The less you communicate, the less people will trust your intentions. The less they trust your intentions, the less they will believe in your leadership capabilities.
Establishing and maintaining this constant communication can be a challenge. Everyone is busy and it is easy to fall into the trap of being so busy working on building the business that you forget to tell people what you are working on. It is tempting to go it alone. But as a leader this is a recipe for disaster.
Communicate clearly, communicate often, and communicate as completely as possible, especially when there is bad news.
Alignment
While the need for alignment to the vision, goals and objectives is critical and a central leadership role, the need for alignment on role clarity is just as central to success.
You need to decide the boundaries of your leadership role; where and how will you get involved? And this needs to be aligned with your leadership team and the alignment should take the form of a two-way dialogue. This negotiation sets up the clear expectations of who does what and delineates what you expect of them and what they can expect of you.
This alignment not only provides clarity on how the work get done but also provides stability and empowers your team. This will enable them to do the jobs they have been hired to do and frees you up to be the leader you want to be.
Balancing on the Tightrope
Once you’ve worked on creating trust, using great communication and work is getting done based on aligned role sorts, what happens in real life?
Well in real life, stuff happens.
Internal and external situations arise where adjustments need to be made. It could be an external threat that needs your involvement or attention. It could be an internal conflict that you need to resolve. As you move along the continuum of involvement in the operations of your business, be mindful of how far into any given situation you are leaning.
This is where the art of leadership comes into play.
Leaning too far in for an extended period will negate all the work you have put into fine-tuning the balance. It can disempower people which will leave you back where you started.
As you get involved in one situation or another do so with the intention of helping and not necessarily controlling. Be sure that how you do this bolsters trust, open communication, alignment, and accountability. Be aware of maintaining control where it belongs in the business so that you do not leave a vacuum when you step out of the situation.
It may feel like you are balancing on a tightrope, but with the basics of trust, communication, and alignment, you will create your safety net.
Sally Egerton is a consultant, coach and writer with +20 years corporate experience and a passion for empowering and enabling performance and growth in people and businesses"It is doesn't terrify me, it's not the right step to take"