CEO Today - December 2021 Edition

EXECUTIVE COACHING www.ceotodaymagazine.com 59 and putting yourself in the best position to lead and make sound decisions is part of your job. I don’t want someone who’s had four hours of sleep a night for the last month and is bleary-eyed to be making an important decision about my livelihood or the company I work for. There’s this great principle in Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism, which is “protect the asset” and the asset is you. Think of a singer. Her voice is her asset so she would do well to protect it - rest up before a big concert so she can perform at her best. It’s the same with leadership. Do what you need to do to recharge. What are the most important takeaways from your book in today’s business world? A key takeaway is adaptability. A leader in today’s world needs to be able to adapt well. This can be adapting to something small like a change in the daily agenda all the way up to navigating a global pandemic. How adaptable are you? How quickly do you realise you need to make adjustments? How well do you deal with uncertainty - can you keep yourself and your team calm and focused? One thing I saw good leaders do when COVID first hit was up their game in terms of adaptability. In early 2020, CEOs had to adapt in terms of their business model and deliverables and also how they worked with their teams internally. New information was coming out at a pretty rapid clip, rules were changing, and decisions had to be made quickly - do we need to lay people off, which departments, how many, can we stay afloat, can we wait and see or do we need to act now. Leaders who adapted to making decisions more quickly than they would have liked did better than those who resisted. I spoke with him afterwards and he said it was important to him that his girls see that their dad could report to a woman and that they could run a company one day. I thought that was fantastic and have always remembered it. For your readers who are men, do not discount how much of a difference you can make with interactions like this one. What would you say to new CEOs building a team? Well, there are many aspects. Paying attention to who is on your leadership team in the first place is important. Look for people aligned in values but who have wildly different skill sets. Maybe it’s a functional area of the business you don’t have direct experience in; maybe it’s a different perspective that you just don’t have - build in those diverse frames of reference. I’ve seen far too many CEOs take the egotistical route and pick people who just make them feel smart and important all the time. Drawing on my experience as a Chief of Staff, my main principal is our CEO. We see things through very different lenses - he comes from a finance background and sees things through numbers, market conditions, spreadsheets; I see things through the human element, team dynamics, building people, processes and tools. Neither vantage point is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, you need both to run a successful business. But we appreciate what the other brings to the table. What’s one aspect of leadership you think is overlooked? Self-care. More and more people have this word in their lexicon, which is a positive step. But, in my one-on- one conversations, I still hear a lot of sentiment around: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’m supposed to do that, Emily - but I don’t have time, too many people are counting on me.” Taking care of yourself So how can one take lessons and ‘hack’ executive leadership? Adaptability is a close cousin of uncertainty. A mistake I see leaders make is automatically labelling change as “bad” or a negative. A helpful motto to remember is change is neutral. Change in and of itself is a neutral event - the subsequent outcome could lead to things you like or don’t like. Humans by nature don’t like when a situation is uncertain. But that awareness and that moment you realise you’re automatically slapping on the negative label is key. The one beat or pause in between allows you to see the automatic program running. In this case, you’ve fused together “change” and “negative”. Now you can hack that code so to speak and run a new program. You can choose a belief and mindset that will serve you better. Change is neutral. You’ll make better decisions because you’re not making it from a place of fear or knee-jerk emotional reaction. You have a clearer head and are more objective. This is just one example. There are many more. It’s a fluid and evolving process as well - the adage: “What got you here, won’t get you there.” There are inflection points in one’s career where the next level up will require something more or different from you. This is one of the reasons why I love being a coach - everyone has their own set of experiences and motivations and it’s about meeting a person where they’re at. I’d highly recommend finding someone who can be an objective sounding board. This person can point out blind spots or offer observations you can’t or don’t see yourself; they can support and encourage you in the right places and challenge and keep you accountable in others. If you have someone who can do this for you - a friend, a mentor, a coach - it’s a great resource. W: www.nextlevel.coach E: emily@nextlevel.coach