Have you ever considered working with a leadership coach?
If you are a leader in your family or family enterprise, you know intimately just how complex this role can be. You also know that while investing your most important relationships and the majority of your resources into a shared effort can be rewarding, it is never simple. Consider, do you have a safe, neutral place to process the challenges and opportunities, all in the context of developing your capacity and agility as a leader? And what would it mean if you did?
The starting point in the relationship between you and your coach is that the coach trusts that you hold the answer and that their role is to help you explore your options and assumptions. Their role is to support you in becoming more self-aware of your strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. What is more, your coach emboldens you to take ownership for each. They encourage you to develop deeper empathy for people, especially for those you lead. They help you develop the ability to frame complex issues by distilling down the essence of a decision. Lastly, they support you in creating value from change, or innovating. Developing these for agilities is how you develop your capacity as well as the mindfulness of being agile enough to know which approach or gear will help you be most effective as a leader.
You do all of this while working on the issues and opportunities as they arise, be it succession, a serious conflict with your sister, or even an offer to sell your family enterprise. One thing I have noticed in decades of working with family business leaders is that most people default to giving advice when someone shares something they are struggling with.
In other words, they get into problem solving mode (i.e., “you know what you need to do”). This approach – we also call this ‘gear’ – has its place, for example when you need a recommendation for a plumber or accountant. But what gets lost in problem solving gear is the opportunity to explore things more deeply. This means that we miss out on any insight that can arise from that collaborative process.
Working with a coach creates that safe, neutral space that is as rare as it is valuable. You can’t go to your spouse or employees for example and say, hey let’s brainstorm me quitting and traveling the world. They have too much skin in the game.
One leader I coached in a family enterprise tended to advocate very vigorously for his ideas with the leadership team, which included his brothers. As we explored this dynamic as part of the leadership coaching process, he came to the insight that he was overusing this problem-solving gear. This overuse caused the rest of the team to feel overwhelmed, unheard, and exhausted. What is more, it strained the brothers’ relationships. The leadership team would eventually give in to his approach, but there was no real buy-in. This resulted in half-hearted efforts on their parts, which led to him feeling like he couldn’t trust them to commit. After a few coaching session, and some greater awareness about this dynamic on his part he could work to make his go-to pattern of over-advocating into a choice. He leaned back a little, learned to be more accommodating, and allowed for more dialog. Thus, he increased both his capacity (to be more accommodating) and his agility (mindfully deciding when to be advocating and when to be accommodating). These actions created greater buy-in and resultant trust. The brothers’ relationship predictably improved as well.
Let me close with a note about those two words I used in the very beginning: capacity and agility. In a world of exponential change, ever-increasing complexity and independency, and tremendous uncertainty, capacity and agility are absolutely vital.
To use a transportation analogy, we all crawl, walk, run, most of us ride a bike, the majority drive a car, and some of us even become pilots. These modes of movement represent the capacity for getting around. In the business or personal context, we could maybe talk about the capacity for strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, or even spiritual development. But what is important besides capacity, or the ability to do something, is having agility, which represents the ability to choose what to do.
To use the transportation analogy again, we can all decide, at any point, which gear we should be in to be the most effective – that can be walking, taking the bike, the car – and for the pilots among us, taking off in a plane. A leadership coach can support in developing not just capacity, but creating space for you to evolve your agility, to become a stronger, more authentic leader for your business and your family.
