Bill Treasurer's Blog, page 4

How to Deal with Leadership Pressures

Leadership is hard. Eventually, All leaders will confront this reality. Sure, leadership can be attractive and seductive, but that doesn’t mean it’s obligation-free. When you’re a leader, the demands on you are fast-moving and unrelenting. Your direct reports are wanting attention, fair treatment, growth opportunities, guidance, and recognition. Meanwhile, the people you answer to expect you to produce results. Ultimately, everybody serves somebody. This is true even if you stand at the apex of the organization. In publicly held companies the CEO answers to a board and shareholders. In privately held companies the owners often answer to siblings, a spouse, and/or a board of advisors. Unless you’re the top banana in a banana republic, you answer to somebody. And that somebody always wants something from you.

The three most common leadership pressures are the “Three Rs”:

The pressures associated with being responsible to others,The relentless pressure of having to produce results, anThe pressures associated with constantly having to perform in the role of leader.

The pressure points are not extraordinary or unusual. On the contrary, they’re rather commonplace and banal. Each pressure point is universal and familiar. Remember, hubris is stealthy. It is always preparing, behind the scenes, hidden in the ordinary landscape of your leadership life, waiting for an entry point. It is against the backdrop of the normalcy of these leadership pressures that can stay well hidden, ready to strike when you least expect it, for it is when you are under a tremendous amount of leadership pressure that you’ll be the most vulnerable to succumbing to hubris’s influence, and when you are most likely to do harm to yourself and others.

Leadership Pressures Forge Results

To be a leader means to get results. Getting results is a fundamental leadership pressure point, and it requires keeping everyone working productively. It’s a simple equation: the more productive people are, the better the results will be. And producing results, as a leader, is what you’re most responsible for. Your effectiveness as a leader will be judged on the magnitude and longevity of the results you get. Period. The pressure to get results is incessant and the strength of the results frequently impacts a leader’s mood and behavior. A leader is far more likely to be grumpy, curt, and abrasive when results are languishing than when they are flourishing.

A good number of Giant Leap Consulting’s clients are privately held owner-led companies. In fact, it’s almost amusing how easily you can tell the financial health of the company just by the mood of the owner. His or her disposition will be directly connected to the P&L. When profits are up, so too are the owner’s spirits. Conversely, when profits are down, the owner can become an irritable diva in search of a Snickers bar! The mood swings extend to the rest of the workforce.

The Leadership Role

Leadership is a role – a part you play in front of many audiences. The role comes with many demands. In the classical (and stereotypical) view of leadership, you are expected to carry yourself with a commanding presence so that people know you’re “in charge.” You are expected to have more experience and knowledge than those you’re leading and to have timely and accurate answers to their many questions. The expectations of the role carry a more subtle expectation: invincibility. You are expected to be strong to the point of being unshakable and invulnerable. You are a direction-giver, not a help-taker. When things get dicey, you’re expected to push interference out of the way and say, “I got this.”

Leadership pressures shouldn’t be avoided. Instead, leadership pressures should be embraced. Understanding the pressures associated with becoming a great leader can help you avoid the pitfalls that come with being the one in charge.

Next time you encounter leadership pressures, how will you embrace them?

This post is based on an excerpt from The Leadership Killer: Reclaiming Humility in an Age of Arrogance.

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Tips For Leaders Who Lead Teams Of Leaders

People want to follow leaders who know where the hell they’re going. So what are a few tips for leaders?

If the leadership team looks like a contentious disorganized mess, people throughout the organization will quickly lose confidence. When you and a small group of other leaders are entrusted with creating a better future for those you lead, being unified at the top is the surest way of gaining people’s confidence. This, of course, is easier said than done.

Gaining unity among senior leadership teams is, for a number of reasons, more challenging than at other levels in an organization.

First, leaders are used to leading, not teaming. A leader of a division or business unit is used to directing the team leaders who report to her. Even if the leader’s approach is collaborative, she is where the buck stops – the decider in chief of her domain. Shifting from the leader to just another member of the leadership team involves a diminishment of power that can feel unnatural.

Second, the ego stakes are also higher on top-level teams. Leadership, consciously or unconsciously, often involves social and/or intellectual dominance. Senior leadership teams often struggle with dysfunctional competitive dynamics as team members try to out-dominate each other. For everyone looking for direction from the leadership team, it can be an ugly sight when they see big egos clashing with big egos.

So What’s a Leadership Team to Do?

The tips that follow stem from Giant Leap’s experience working with senior executive teams:

Unify Around ValuesValues are natural unifiers. While leadership team members may differ in style and approach, they can find commonality around values. The first place to start is with the organization’s values. If those haven’t been explicitly codified, have the team craft its own set of core values by asking this question: When we are working at our best, what shows up?Be Behavioral Standard-BearersLeaders set the behavioral tone for the rest of the organization. If the leadership team members are petty, domineering, or uncooperative with each other, you can bet people in the rest of the organization will behave that way too. Have the leadership team flipchart their answers to these questions: What is the rest of the organization looking for our team to provide? What kind of leadership team do we need to be, to best serve the people in our organization?Set Shared GoalsDuring leadership team meetings, pay more attention to shared organizational goals than to divisional or business unit goals. Place more emphasis on where the organization is going directionally than how each division is doing operationally.Create Opportunities To Co-LeadStrategic initiatives are often spawned during senior leadership team meetings. When they are, rather than assigning one person to own or sponsor the initiative, let two or three members act as co-leaders. Doing so will necessitate cross-team collaboration, which can go a long way toward dismantling divisional walls.Formally Schedule Informal TimeLeaders are under constant pressure to perform. Making results happen is always the priority. As such, members of leadership teams don’t often make time for the informal bonding that characterizes strong teams. Whoever organizes the senior team meetings should weave occasional get-to-know-you segments into the agenda (it works best at the agenda’s start). Another approach is to task each team member with learning something unique about another member’s outside-of-work self and bringing what they learn back to the entire team. There are plenty of ways to promote informal bonding. Just get creative.The most successful organizations are led by unified leadership teams.

When everyone else sees leaders who cooperate, collaborate, and team well together, they start to emulate the same behaviors. The benefit to the leadership team itself is just as powerful: enjoyment.

When top team leaders learn to play nice in the sandbox with one another, the team experience becomes more enjoyable. When that happens, the leadership team becomes a safe haven where top team members can support, guide, and encourage each other, becoming leaders helping leaders.

Leadership starts with a cohesive leadership team. How do you lead your leaders and does that translate to success throughout your organization?

Want more valuable leadership tips? Check out these related posts:

5 Tips for Thriving Leadership

What Every Leader Should Be Doing

 

This post was updated August 2024

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Personal Transformation Through Leadership

Some executives think that leadership is only about momentum and results. The best leaders, however, do more than move us forward. They also help us rise above who we are so that we can move closer to the person we can become. The best leaders lift us up. They elevate our standards, ethics, and performance by creating opportunities for personal transformation.

Human growth and development require constantly advancing from who you are to who you want to become. In order to do that, you first must discover who you truly are, and this is a big challenge for most people. Without knowing who you are, how can you ever know what to transform about yourself? Open-door leaders promote personal transformation by helping us know ourselves better, by holding us accountable to our own potential, and sometimes, by hitting us upside the head with the left hook of reality. The most powerful means of promoting personal transformation, though, is through the examples they set for us as role models.

Role Modeling Personal Transformation

There is no more powerful influence on the culture of a workplace than the behavior of its leaders. Leaders set the behavioral tone of the organization, so it’s important that they keep evolving and growing. This means purposefully doing things that are uncomfortable that create opportunities for their own development. It’s much easier to follow people who embody the values they are asking us to live up to. Sometimes opening the door for transformation is simply a matter of pointing a person in the direction of their potential and holding steady until they reach it.

Could You Be a Velvet Hammer?

One of the most effective ways to increase the likelihood of a personal transformation in others is to give straightforward feedback. Open-door leaders give us the kind of feedback that takes courage to deliver and even more courage to hear, and personal transformation is almost impossible without it.

Some people pride themselves on being brutally honest. But brutality almost always puts up people’s defenses. The open-door leader provides feedback in a way that gets through to people so they can put the feedback to work and transform their behavior. The balance is one of assertiveness and diplomacy. Before delivering tough feedback, be thoughtful about what you want to say. Make sure it is absorbable and digestible so that your words will be met with reception and not defensiveness. Being a velvet hammer is not about making them feel ashamed of themselves or afraid of you. The point is to communicate assertively and respectably so that the other person benefits from the feedback. Deliver your honesty without brutality.

How a Follower Made Me a Leader

Very few people have the courage to give their boss upward feedback. Respecting authority is one of our earliest lessons. So, when faced with an abhorrent boss, most people bite their tongue, which only further enables the abhorrent behavior.

Open-Door Leaders Move Us Toward Self-Transformation

Socrates advised us to “know thyself.” It is, of course, very good advice, because it is hard to change yourself if you have no idea who you really are. But knowing yourself and transforming yourself based solely on introspection is next to impossible. Open-door leaders serve us best when they help us see ourselves in a different way. By being a good role model, opening the doors to allow us to experience transformation, holding us accountable to our own potential, and giving us direct and diplomatic feedback, open-door leaders help us transform from the person we are to the person we’re capable of becoming.

As a leader, do you lift those around you? Find your place helping others through the journey of personal transformation.

This post is based on an excerpt from Leaders Open Doors.

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Living The Life Of A Filler

I can’t get enough of the human-interest stories that news programs produce. I think they are fascinating. These stories provide a glimpse into real lives, and they demonstrate the truth that every person has a story worth telling.

Thanks to the Today Show, I got to learn a little about Mr. Tyrone Curry. He is a Vietnam veteran, a high school janitor with 35 years on the job, the high school’s track coach, and the winner of a $3.4 million lottery.

There are many aspects of Mr. Curry’s story that I found fascinating to learn about, but the one theme that really jumped out to me was how focused he was on supporting other people. He’s spent $40,000 one summer to build a state-of-the-art track field for his team. He wanted to build a better tennis court complex to support the tennis coach and team.

One example soared though. One of his senior students lost his mom to a heart attack quite suddenly. The boy’s father isn’t around, and the honor student started to flounder. The young man was just going through the motions of life and didn’t see how his future could get better. And one day Coach Curry pulled him aside and walked down the track with him. In a few words, he reminded the boy that he wasn’t on his own. Mr. Curry is going to pay for this young man’s college education.

Encouraging Others

It seems to me that Mr. Curry understands the importance of supporting and encouraging others. When Curry’s dream to become a teacher was cut short 35 years ago due to budget cuts, he found a way to stay within the education field by becoming a janitor and coach. He shifted his medium, but his purpose remained the same.

Mr. Curry is a living example of what we would call a Filler Leader. He seeks opportunities for encouraging others to succeed in the face of challenge and to be courageous and get so much fulfillment from that act of support.

I love these real-life examples of how people support one another. Have you had a person encourage you at critical moments of your life? Tell us about your experience.

Learn more about living the life of a FIller in Leaders Open Doors: A Radically Simple Leadership Approach to Lift People, Profits, and Performance.

Updated July 2024

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5 Tips for Thriving Leadership

Effective, thriving leadership begins with self-leadership. No one wants to follow a leader who can’t manage themselves. Self-leadership is the foundation that qualifies you to lead others. You must assess and improve your personal habits, mindset, and behavior. Here are some indicators that you might need to strengthen your self-leadership.

Here are 5 tips for thriving leadership:1. Lead Yourself First

Nobody wants a leader who can’t even lead himself. Leading yourself is the starting standard that begins to qualify you to lead others.

Here are some ways to tell if you’re lacking in self-leadership:

Your personal life is a mess.You’re out of shape, physically, mentally, and spiritually.You’re frequently in a state of anger and are quick to let your emotions get the best of you.You assume the worst first and complain a lot.You’re disorganized, often miss deadlines, and frequently run late.You mentally or verbally negatively judge others more than you should.

Self-leadership starts with a realistic assessment of your strengths and opportunities for development. It requires intentionally, consistently, and diligently improving yourself. Forever.

2. Value Values

The leaders we most admire embody and uphold enduring principles and values. They have a certain congruency – having values and living according to them. They are the opposite of hypocritical leaders that we don’t admire – people who say one thing and do another. The difference between having values and living them, and saying you have them and not living them, is the difference between having and not having integrity. To be a good leader, you have to have good values. Take stock of what you stand for, and what you stand against.

Consider this:

What values do you hold most dear?What values would others say you most embody?In what ways do your goals, priorities, and actions line up with your values? In what ways don’t they line up with your values?Which values are nonnegotiable and define a boundary you will always uphold?

Value your values. They are the stuff that character is made of.

3. Name Your Fear

Hubris feeds on fear. The ego is designed to protect you from harm or danger, so it is hypervigilant against threats. The more threatened your ego feels, the more it will act preemptively against what it finds threatening. This protection mechanism is at the root of much of the intimidating behavior you see from arrogant leaders. At the core, arrogant leaders are fearful leaders. They externalize their own fear by intimidating you into fearing them. The more you fear them, the less threatened they feel. Thus, to prevent yourself from becoming a fear-based leader, it’s important to identify the things you find threatening. Here are a few common fears that arrogant leaders preemptively strike against. Which ones, if any, do you find threatening? Are there other threats you’d add to the list? What actions can you take to mitigate your fears so they don’t get externalized in the form of intimidating behavior?

Common fears: 

People not respecting you.Not getting what you want.Losing something you’ve earned.Failing to achieve results.Not getting fairly recognized and rewarded.People judging you as less valuable than your peers.Not being in control

When you feel fear, avoid displacing it through intimidating or abusive behavior, act with courage by exploring what’s driving your fear, and working through it.

4. Start and End Your Day with Two Key Questions

This tip is a few hundred years old, which speaks to its durability and usefulness. It comes from the autobiography of the truest of Americans, Benjamin Franklin. Each day, upon waking, old Ben asked himself, “What good shall I do this day?” It gave his day immediate purpose, focus, and direction. This question helped orient all of his actions and conversations that day. It also helped him put on a service mindset. Notice the question isn’t about productivity, it’s about goodness. When most of us think about doing good we aren’t thinking about ourselves. We do good for others.

But the question itself requires a check. It’s not enough to start the day with a noble intention. We must finish the day with careful reflection on the actual ways we have made a positive impact on the lives of others. After all, as a leader, what good are you if you aren’t doing good? Hence Franklin’s second question, which he asked each evening, “What good have I done today?”

5. Respect Self and Others

Too many leaders pay lip service to the importance of respect but are personally disrespectful. They show up late to meetings, they interrupt people, and they don’t abide by the rules they want others to conform to. Real respect is earned, day in and day out. How?

By doing such things as…

Making others feel important by treating them like they matter, regardless of their rank, because, guess what?…they do!Seeking out and listening to the insights and ideas of others, and taking their concerns seriously. Remember, your success as a leader is dependent upon your good work. So they matter more to you than you do to them.Acting like an adult is supposed to act. Don’t fly off the handle when people make mistakes, and when engaged in conflict, fight fair. Don’t use fear to motivate people. Don’t manipulate others just to get your way. In other words, keep your emotions in check. If you aren’t able to, consider seeking help because you might not actually be an adult, but some kind of baby that managed to rise through the management ranks!Apologizing quickly, candidly, and sincerely. When you mess up, fess up.Producing. Talk is cheap. Real leaders do real work and make real things happen. One of the leaders we worked with, the director of a scientific research center at a leading university, said it best, “Get stuff done.”Being self-respectful. Having and upholding boundaries and saying “no” when they’re crossed. Trusting your instincts by listening to, and following your intuition. Using positive internal “self-talk”, and giving yourself credit when you do a good job.

As a leader, how do you focus on staying humble, balanced, and focused on those you’re privileged to lead?

Interested in other leadership topics? Find more here:What Every Leader Should Be DoingRisk Being Yourself

 

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The Open-Door Policy

Leadership is often defined as a set of behaviors by which one person influences others toward the achievement of goals. Put more simply, leadership is about momentum and results. While these definitions are true, they somehow fall short. What mechanism should a leader use, for example, to “influence” strong performance? Has leadership evolved beyond carrots and sticks? And what about the people being led? Besides a paycheck, what do they get out of getting results for the leader? What’s in it for them?
After all, the leader’s success depends on them, right?

Opportunity

What’s missing is opportunity. In exchange for advancing the leader’s goals, the people being led should expect work opportunities that provide for:

growth and personal developmentcareer fulfillment and enrichmentacquisition of new skillsfinancial gain and other rewardsgreater access to leadership roles.

People and organizations grow and develop to the extent that they capitalize on opportunities to do so. Opportunities are important to leaders because they’re important to the people they lead. Opportunities are the venues where people can try, test, better, and even find themselves. The leader’s job is to match the opportunity to the person and to help the person—and the organization—exploit that opportunity for all it’s worth. Open-door leadership is about noticing, identifying, and creating opportunities for those being led.

Be More than an Open-Door

Think for a moment about a leader you greatly admire. Pick someone who has led you, rather than someone on the world stage. What do you admire about him or her? Did he open a door to an opportunity where you could grow your skills or improve yourself, such as asking you to lead a high-profile project? Did she help illuminate a blind spot by giving you candid feedback that caused you to see yourself in a different and more honest way? Maybe he built your confidence by asking for your perspective, input, and ideas. Or did she openly advocate for your promotion, showing you how much she valued you? What doors did he open for you?

My bet is that the leaders you most admire are the ones who left you better off than they found you by creating opportunities that helped you grow. How?

being open to you, valuing your input and perspectivebeing open with you, telling you the truth even if the truth is difficult to hearhelping you be receptive to new possibilities and experiences and new ways of perceiving and thinking.

Open-door leadership involves creating or assigning opportunities in order to promote growth. By promoting the growth of those they lead, leaders increase the likelihood of their own success and advancement. They also increase the likelihood of creating other leaders, which is essential to building a lasting leadership legacy. Leaders create leaders by opening doors of opportunity that have a positive and lasting impact on the behavior of those they lead.

Open Doors for Others

To be clear, open-door leadership is not about having an open-door policy. Such policies are just more management hokum. One of the surest signs of a rookie leader is the claim, “I have an open-door policy, and my door is always open so my employees can get to me.” Allowing yourself to be continuously interrupted is a recipe for lousy leadership. If your door is always open, how on earth can you get any work done on behalf of the people who are interrupting you? Open-door leadership is not about having a policy of keeping your door open to others. It’s about taking action to open doors for others. It is about so much more than
giving people unfettered access to you.

As a leader, how do you open doors for others? Next time you see an opportunity arise for someone, don’t let it pass them by.

This post is based on an excerpt from Leaders Open Doors: A Radically Simple Leadership Approach to Lift People, Profits, and Performance.

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Opportunity Focused Leadership

Do you aim to be a problem-focused leader or an opportunity focused leader?

Many work environments place a premium on leaders with critical thinking and problem-solving skills. However, that premium often places too much emphasis on being critical and dealing with problems. In such workplaces, leaders can become downers, always harping on what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed. Such leaders often resort to stoking people’s fears to motivate them to get things done. This fear-stoking is exemplified by one of the most overused phrases in the history of business: What keeps me awake at night is . . .

Think about it. When leaders talk about (or more often brag about) what keeps them awake at night, aren’t they really just showcasing their fears and anxieties? It’s as if some leaders believe that the only way they’ll get any rest is to make the entire workforce share in their fears. Unless people are as afraid as they are, the leaders think that no one will be motivated enough to address whatever is causing them to lose sleep. But putting people on your 24-hour fear cycle isn’t motivating at all—insomnia shouldn’t be a leadership badge of honor.

Leaders would be better served to talk about what gets them up in the morning instead of what keeps them awake at night. Opportunity attracts and excites employees more than problems do. People want to follow leaders who have such confidence in them and the opportunities that the future holds. People want to follow leaders who sleep soundly at night.

What Does Opportunity Attract?Opportunity pulls.

Leading by stoking people’s fears provokes anxiety and negative thoughts of impending painful consequences. Opportunities, on the other hand, are hopeful situations that evoke positive thoughts of pleasurable rewards. Leadership is most effective when it moves people toward a desired outcome, rather than getting them to run away from a bad outcome. Opportunity attracts; fear repels.

Opportunity points in the right direction.

When you are talking about opportunities, you are talking about the conditions you want, instead of the conditions you want to prevent from happening. Because outcomes often follow the direction of our thoughts, it’s best to focus on what you want. Saying, “Our opportunity is to keep the ball in the air,” is better than “Whatever you do, don’t drop that ball!”

Opportunity activates the imagination.

We “take advantage of” or “capitalize on” opportunities. They are conditions that don’t yet exist and require people’s hard work and imagination to be fully exploited.

Opportunity inspires courage.

Opportunities are not “sure things” and the positive outcome you hope to create is not guaranteed. Thus, opportunities come with potential risks. The risk is what infuses the pursuit of opportunities with excitement.

Opportunity begets opportunity.

Wouldn’t you rather have your employees coming to you with new ideas and opportunities they want you to support, instead of problems they want you to resolve? When you model opportunistic thinking, you increase the likelihood of building a self-sufficient, “can-do” spirit among employees.

A leader’s primary job is to actively create opportunities that bring about real and concrete benefits. A leader should leave us better off than they found us. Leaders don’t sell hope. In fact, they don’t sell anything. Leaders build. Leaders experiment. They act. They create. Opportunity focused leaders help lay the groundwork for others.

Opportunity is all around you and as a leader, it’s your job to find and embrace that opportunity. How will you weed out the problems and become an opportunity focused leader?

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The Anatomy of a Butt Kick: Overcoming a Career Setback

In any given month, I have upwards of twenty one-on-one executive coaching sessions. It’s very common for those conversations to center on helping a coachee process a career setback. The setbacks are often painful, like a swift kick in the rear end. As painful as they often are, they can often bring about positive transformational changes for a leader. My book, A Leadership Kick in the Ass, is written to help leaders work through those moments when they feel like the world is kicking their butts.

What is a butt-kick? All butt kicks, butt kickers, and butt-kick recipients are unique. Each situation is unique to everyone involved. That said, hiney-smacking events also share a few common elements. Let’s dissect the dreaded kick in the but and understand the anatomy.

Each kick has four stages:Comfortable Oblivion

Prior to getting kicked, you are blind to your own behavior. Life is going swimmingly and you are blithely unaware of the impending insult. Oftentimes you are full of confidence. You can quickly marshal the facts that support the value you’re adding to the organization you serve. You view yourself as competent, aware, and deserving. In the case above, Pete walked into the CFO’s office oblivious to the kick he was set to receive.

Startling Sting

Ouch, that hurts! Butt kicks assault our comfort and, thus, are painful events. As a rule, the more oblivious you are prior to the kick, the more painful the kick will feel. A kick is painful, partly because of his degree of prekick obliviousness, and partly because getting fired is a kick with a serious windup. Most commonly, kicks provoke emotions of fear, anger, rejection, or depression. These emotions often result in defensiveness and self-righteousness— How dare they kick my ass this way!

Change Choice

After the sting starts to subside, you are left with a choice. Broadly defined, your choice comes down to accept or reject. We’ll explore this stage in more depth in a moment because it’s the most critical stage in the butt-kick process.

Humility or Arrogance

Depending on the decision you make in stage three, stage four will result in either deeper arrogance or genuine humility. If you double down on your conviction that your kick was an undeserved injustice, you’ll fortify your sense of righteousness. If you take the lumps the kick brings and make changes based on the information that it provides you, you’ll exit the butt-kick event with a view of yourself that is more grounded, sober, and humble.

As mentioned, the more oblivious you are before the butt kick, the harder it hits. Stage one determines the intensity of stage two.

Defensiveness is a lagging emotion. It is a reaction that is provoked when people feel threatened and afraid. Abrupt kicks jeopardize your sense of identity, your feelings of contentment, and your financial and psychological security. So your ego does what it’s supposed to do—it defends you. It’s easier, at first, for your ego to come to your defense than for you to accept that something about you needs to change. So the self-preservation part of your brain kicks in and starts to scan your memory catalog to find evidence that invalidates the hard-hitting feedback. How could this happen to me? I’ll show them how wrong they are! is a common refrain

Next time you feel a kick in the rear, pause to consider your response. Reflect on how you might have been better prepared. What strategies will you deploy to brace for future, inevitable challenges?

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

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The Anatomy of a Butt Kick

What is a butt-kick? All butt kicks, butt kickers and butt-kick recipients are unique. Each situation is unique to everyone involved. That said, hiney-smacking events also share a few common elements. Let’s dissect the dreaded kick in the but and understand the anatomy.

Each kick has four stages:

Comfortable Oblivion

Prior to getting kicked, you are blind to your own behavior. Life is going swimmingly and you are blithely unaware of the impending insult. Oftentimes you are full of confidence. You can quickly marshal the facts that support the value you’re adding to the organization you serve. You view yourself as competent, aware, and deserving. In the case above, Pete walked into the CFO’s office oblivious to the kick he was set to receive.

Startling Sting

Ouch, that hurts! Butt kicks assault our comfort and, thus, are painful events. As a rule, the more oblivious you are prior to the kick, the more painful the kick will feel. A kick is painful, partly because of his degree of prekick obliviousness, and partly because getting fired is a kick with a serious windup. Most commonly, kicks provoke emotions of fear, anger, rejection, or depression. These emotions often result in defensiveness and self-righteousness— How dare they kick my ass this way!

Change Choice

After the sting starts to subside, you are left with a choice. Broadly defined, your choice comes down to accept or reject. We’ll explore this stage in more depth in a moment because it’s the most critical stage in the butt-kick process.

Humility or Arrogance

Depending on the decision you make in stage three, stage four will result in either deeper arrogance or genuine humility. If you double down on your conviction that your kick was an undeserved injustice, you’ll fortify your sense of righteousness. If you take the lumps the kick brings and make changes based on the information that it provides you, you’ll exit the butt-kick event with a view of yourself that is more grounded, sober, and humble.

As mentioned, the more oblivious you are before the butt kick, the harder it hits. Stage one determines the intensity of stage two.

Defensiveness is a lagging emotion. It is a reaction that is provoked when people feel threatened and afraid. Abrupt kicks jeopardize your sense of identity, your feelings of contentment, and your financial and psychological security. So your ego does what it’s supposed to do—it defends you. It’s easier, at first, for your ego to come to your defense than for you to accept that something about you needs to change. So the self-preservation part of your brain kicks in and starts to scan your memory catalog to find evidence that invalidates the hard-hitting feedback. How could this happen to me? I’ll show them how wrong they are! is a common refrain

Next time you feel a kick in the rear, pause to consider your response. Reflect on how you might have been better prepared. What strategies will you deploy to brace for future, inevitable challenges?

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

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What Every Leader Should Be Doing

Every leader needs a courage zone. When we talk about courageous leadership in our workshops, we talk about the comfort zone. We all have a comfort zone and that is the place where we feel confident and capable. That is also the zone where we are not pushed to learn new ideas or challenge ourselves with different responsibilities. Learning does not happen in a zone of comfort.

Learning occurs in discomfort. Ginny Rometty, former CEO of IBM, sums it up perfectly, “Growth and comfort don’t coexist.”

It is important not to make yourself so uncomfortable that you freeze, but a certain amount of discomfort means that you are stepping into your courage zone. If you want to push yourself to new heights personally or professionally, you have to step into the courage zone.

The Courage Zone

The kicker is that the zone looks different for each of us. It could be that the idea of public speaking makes you tremble. That tremble means you are in your courage zone. Perhaps the possibility of taking on a new job that requires skills that eclipse your current skill set makes your heart race. That speeding heart means you are in your courage zone. Or maybe the idea of being truthful with your boss and letting them in on a personal matter that is affecting you at work makes your palms sweat. Those sweaty palms mean you are in your courage zone.

Workplace courage looks different to each of us because what causes us fear is different. I hope you have already identified some ways that you can challenge yourself to step into your courage zone more often, but that’s not the point about leadership I want to make today. Today, I want you to consider that your greatest responsibility as a leader is to encourage those you lead out of their comfort zones and into their courage zones.

Success

If you want your organization to succeed and your people to flourish, they have got to be in a courageous culture. A place where new ideas are encouraged, people are given the time to speak up and share their points of view, and trust-filled relationships are developed. Good leaders want to develop the skills of the people around them. That means you have got to encourage them to move into their courage zone more often.

How do you get them into their zone? First, you have to find out what they want to accomplish and what causes them fear. Make these conversations part of the annual review process and incorporate this into how you hold them accountable. You also have to model courage to them. Tell them about the times that you moved through discomfort, even though something was risky or caused your heart to beat fast. Model and encourage courageous behavior. As a leader, you might end up impressed by where your people lead you.

Thinking about your past experiences and yourself, how can you help others find their courage zone?

Are you interested in other posts about courage? Check out these other topics:

Courageous Living

The Three Buckets of Courage

Updated April 2024

Image by Anja from Pixabay

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