258: Building Leadership Resilience

Dear Friends
 
Last week we explored the work of leadership. This week we  turn to building leadership resilience.

Recently, a client of mine was asked to lead a future-focused Board committee.

Excited, he said, “It’s important work”, paused, “It’s stressful” and then continued with a smile, “Well, important work is, by its very nature, stressful”.

Quite. Important equals stressful.

To do important well, we need resilience.

We forget it is us – our souls, our knowledge, our energy and emotions, our connections and communities and habits – who power leadership’s work.

We get so busy doing, that we forget to renew and replenish, resulting in us being less effective and less joyful, less ourselves.
 
/strategy
I wish organisations would budget time and employee engagement as rigorously as they do cash. They should, cash paid for it.

It’s the reason I value weekly one-on-one contact. Marcus Buckingham’s research tells us weekly check ins, “drive engagement scores up 77 percent, and voluntary turnover in the next six months down 67 percent”. That’s a serious dividend.

Simultaneously, few things frustrate me more than the wastage that results from unthinking compliance with rote rituals.  

For these reasons Ron Carucci’s Why Senior Leaders Should Stop Having So Many One-on-Ones made me pause.

One-on-one connection is powerful.

Meeting load is a source of stress and often ineffectiveness.

Carucci argues executive level one-on-ones create four risks — fragmented governance, reinforcing a bias to functional siloes, wasting time transmitting and translating (or defending) decisions made privately and, of course, subtly triggering rivalry between executives, “creating a sense of secrecy and status that erodes collective trust.”

Like many things of great design, his solution is simple. By subtracting he introduces new dynamism.

He advises instead ‘meet with capability councils’ – bring together the two to four functional areas (and no more than that) critical to driving capabilities central to delivering strategy.

The meeting will need more time, but you’ll reduce the one-on-one load, minimise corridor chatter, and catalyse vital connection between executives.

Carucci’s Capability Councils echo the  Strategy Councils that existed in all of Jim Collin’s Good to Great businesses.

They’re a place to have ongoing, focused debate and discussion between senior executives, guiding and agreeing the intentional action that delivers on strategy.

They’re potentially places of rich dialogue and reflective thinking, making strategy and coordination a living, adaptive, process.

I worried about that the personal knowledge and connection that is the magic glue of high-performing teams might suffer. So, I reached out to Ron, and I liked his answer.

This approach forces leaders to be intentional about fostering connection – to have the informal lunches, to do the coffee walks, to simply hang out, to really build relationship.

Connection is as important as strategy coordination.

It’s a powerful approach. We often think informal connection means we’re dodging ‘real work’ – we must get to outcomes. Yet, time and again, I see with my clients –investment in connection unlocks outsize results.

And frankly, it makes life happier. That should be reason enough.

In both instances, subtraction creates a distillation with real punch.

Carucci closes the circle, recommending a quarterly 90-minute deep-dive professional development conversation.

Personal growth is a key driver of engagement, and it can get lost when weekly meetings become rote. And, if you have the conversation over a great lunch, or on a walk, the results will be better still.

Important work is, by its very nature, stressful. How we structure our time, and relationships can either compound that stress or make it meaningful.

NB: Carucci is specifically focussed on business’ executive layers. He observes, “Lower in the organization, 1:1 meetings serve different purposes that may make more sense when people are guiding middle managers, supervisors, or individual contributors.”

As with everything in business, it must be situationally appropriate and requires regular maintenance.
When there’s a need, institute the weekly one-on-one. When the situation changes, cancel it.

[If you don’t feel ready to risk overhauling your meeting structure, why not try an experiment? Create a plan with your team. Pilot it for a month or even just a week. Assess. What worked? What didn’t? Too often we stop ourselves before we’ve tried. Or even simpler, share this letter and Ron’s article with your team and discuss what you could improve].

//self
Having an intentional meeting structure design is powerful, but without selfcare, it can only go so far.

Last week’s letter introduced Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis and the Work of Leadership.

In the latter, Heifetz and Laurie, advocate embracing leadership as a journey of ongoing, intentional, learning.

They argue, “the prevailing notion that leadership consists of having a vision and aligning people with that vision is bankrupt because it continues to treat adaptive situations as if they were technical: The authority figure is supposed to divine where the company is going, and people are supposed to follow”.

It is massively stressful thinking you must be the one with the grand solution. Ideally, once a year, at the corporate retreat. More pressure! Just when you’re meant to be enjoying sundowners.

They advise – embrace leadership as an everyday activity, always be leading, always be learning and have a strategy for both.  

It’s a liberating approach.

Episodic leadership forces us into ‘get it right’.

Everyday learning leadership gives us the chance for continuous strengthening and improvement.

Imagine Carucci’s capability council reinforced with regular reading by the same executives – shared language, shared understanding, enhanced effectiveness.

Every leader, every organisation should be learning. And when they do, stress drops and effectiveness increases.  Having a learning strategy enables systematic momentum building (I’m always amazed at how large organisation spend millions sending people on executive education but have no process to connect alumni of schools or bring the learning into the business).

Leading in complexity is taxing. The work of helping people manage their fears, anxiety and sometimes overcoming their active resistance takes enormous energy.

Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky suggest four tactics – Give yourself permission to be both optimistic and realistic; find sanctuaries where you can reflect and regain perspective; reach out to confidants with whom you can debrief and don’t lose yourself in your role.

And a fifth, which I am highlighting, because for many leaders it’s counter-intuitive:

“Bring more of your emotional self to the workplace. Appropriate displays of emotion can be an effective tool for change, especially when balanced with poise. Maintaining this balance lets people know that although the situation is fraught with feelings, it is containable”.
 
/// soul
In a 1957 speech to the National Defence Executive Reserve Conference, Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”.

He made a similar point in a 1950 letter to Hamilton Fish Armstrong “I always remember the observation of a very successful soldier who said, ‘Peace times plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable’”.

Slow down when you can. Go deep when you can. Get perspective when you can. Enrich your knowledge when you can. Create the time and you will create time.
 
All the best
 
Karl
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PPS: You might also like Five Ways to Declutter Your Workday and How to Be Effective.