Just as my errant ways saw me forced to take an unplanned vacation from the classroom when I was at school, throughout my professional career I have been a difficult employee to manage. Ambitious, full of ideas and unafraid to share my opinion, I had a hard time adapting to the traditional professional environment with its usual pitfalls of hierarchy and structure.
It won’t be a surprise for you to hear therefore that my early career was littered with bosses issuing constructive criticism as explicit as it was consistent. ‘You’ll never advance your career or be an effective leader if you don’t learn how to better work with people,' they’d tell me.
I understood this intuitively at the time - but I also knew that I could not just switch off my independent nature. And, in all honestly, I did not want to. Compromising who I inherently was in order to get ahead just did not seem worth it. So it was a puzzling time in my life as I weighed up my future priorities.
Fast forward to today and I am the chief executive of a global business responsible for managing the very same kind of team, hierarchy, and processes that I struggled with just a relatively short time ago.
So how does a suspended school boy end up running an organisation with more 150,000 members in 127 countries? What lessons do I bring from my professional life to my current role?
- I have always maintained an independent spirit, trusted my instincts. Most people in the world respond to the universe – I prefer to create it. Today I spend a lot of time encouraging others to do the same. I believe it is an important part of my responsibilities to empower and facilitate independent flare and ideas to create a culture where individuals don’t feel held back by rank, their team or position.
- I believe in the power of a collective vision fueled by independent spirit. It’s about being unafraid of pioneering new ways of doing things. I want people to genuinely believe in the vision for our business, and I feel this belief often comes when their own ideas, whether used or not, have formed part of the journey to get there. Creating an environment where people have the ability to share their ideas, no matter where they sit within the business, often times results in greater productivity, draws out the best in people and provokes a more inspired culture.
- Some leaders bottle-up their real personalities because they believe it is necessary to develop a persona that matches an existing culture or expectation. I believe that while a leadership position often brings with it a level of self-regulation, particularly as you embed yourself in a new role, it is important not to over-regulate to the point of being inauthentic. Most of us can pick a fraud a mile off. Who wants to follow someone pretending to be someone else? Leadership is not a popularity contest. I have no issue with anyone criticizing my behavior, personality, or approach because I am genuinely doing what I feel is best for the business and the people that rely on me. And I am being myself while I do it. Your staff need and want to trust you are the real deal.
- Finally, you have got to be self-aware. It may sound obvious, but having a firm grasp on how your reactions and interactions impact others is imperative. This applies to people at all levels in their career, but even more so for people in leadership positions. We’re all human and sometimes we don’t manage a particular situation as well as we might have liked. But what may seem like an isolated ripple of wayward management could swell into a tidal wave of misgivings in the minds of those you have affected. It is due to this that I truly believe leaders can not afford to have an off-day.
Image: Alex Malley interviewing celebrity chef and entrepreneur Curtis Stone.
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