As a business coach I work regularly with leaders who perceive themselves caught in a trap. This trap consists of having to choose between leading authentically, lead by their leadership values, and the style of leadership they see as being rewarded around them.
In previous articles, I have touched on the following:
Knowing your values as a leader, grounding your approach to leadership in them, gives you the opportunity to be, and your team to experience, an authentic leader.
Never have I seen leaders work as hard as when they feel bound to represent and work by a type of leadership significantly contradicting their authentic way of doing things.
As a business coach these are often the situations leaders work on with me.
We’re not talking about the small things which occur in every working environment here. There is a high likelihood that something like the choice of in-office weekday, weekly meeting slots, choice of celebratory occasions, etc… will not satisfy everyone 100%.
We’re talking about big things like how to treat employees, what to do when profits aren’t as expected, etc…
It’s where leaders feel they need to act in a way that contradicts their core values that things get more complicated.
What’s the answer? That leaders need to faithfully carry all decisions made by their organisations, without question? That leaders create alternate mini-universes in organisations with their own leadership values? Neither of these.
Complexity as we know it today highlights why giving leaders the freedom to lead authentically is so important.
Achieving that requires work on all levels. It means that company values need to allow for leader’s values to be incorporated and be realistic enough so that leaders can find themselves in them. This happens only when leaders are aware what their values are and how they want to apply them. As a business coach I can help leaders and organisations elaborate on their values.
Elaborating on values means figuring out together what the most important values are, followed by defining what living these values means in their daily working lives.
A method I like using as a business coach here is working with dilemmas and using these as examples to give leaders and teams the chance to thing very concretely about what living their values means to them. The benefit of using dilemmas is that they are never simplistic, and close to real working day situations.
Using dilemmas makes something large and sometimes hard grasp very specific and easier to discuss and develop.
Even if that solutions is not always straightforward. Does that make the process easy? Emphatically not! It requires an openness to disagree and cooperate from all team members, irrelevant at which level. Furthermore, it requires a willingness to find a solution that works for all. In the end, the hard work is worth it.
It creates a foundation that works for whole teams and organisations, and kicks off a process supporting authentic leadership and driving authentic communication throughout.
Piqued your interest? Then get in touch. There are many different ways we can approach this for you, your team and organisation, using coaching and training. Looking forward to hearing from you!
