It had been two weeks since I received the email to re-schedule our session. I knew Jason had stepped into his new role, two month earlier, as Senior Director, now reporting directly to corporate.
Our last session focused on the transition from his former operational role to the new level of strategic accountability. “What are the biggest opportunities for your leadership development in this promotion?”, I prompted. Jason was stymied for a moment, but picked up the conversation in his confident, down-home style, “Dive deeper into the financial side of the business, understand the business model from a strategic position, hone my negotiation skills, learn to collaborate with my peers and other business units, continue to develop my leadership tools and skills. Hmmm…that’s about it.”
I could tell, our previous coaching sessions had prepared Jason well for this unexpected promotion. We addressed several key areas during our 12 month engagement: his core values/beliefs and how they aligned with the company; team engagement, responsibility, and accountability; persuasion, influence, authority and negotiation; and personal well-being and how it effects his performance.
Jason’s assessments strongly indicated his predisposition to focus on career and achievement drives and I sensed the head long lure of this new leadership role. It would be a challenge for Jason to stop himself from a full-throttle immersion into his new job. His assessment also revealed development gaps in his leadership, such as interpersonal engagement, influence, intellectual engagement and others, which if remained untended would impact his success as a growing senior leader.
Several phone calls and emails later, the reply came as an email, “I had the reschedule marked on my to do list, thanks for the reminder. I’ve been distracted for sure. I’ll get some dates and times for us to follow up.” This reply was an easily predicted outcome of Jason’s experience of overwhelm. It was clear that if I experienced missed meeting, distractions, etc. in our engagement, the same was probably happening in other areas of Jason’s accountability.
I wasn’t concerned that Jason was in overwhelm in his new position. Overwhelm is an opportunity to grow as a leader. A time to discover missing tools, key gaps in skills or areas of control that shutdown collaboration and cooperation. My concern was his lack of awareness of overwhelm and the missing acknowledgement , coming two months later in the his email reply. The lack of awareness about his state could lead to a delay or a total derailment of future leadership opportunity with the company.
Feelings of overwhelm come from the thought of how much you have not done and not from how much you have to do. Down-grading anything perceived as “…not adding value…” to the job is a typical first action a leader invokes in overwhelm. So, perceiving the immediate value of personal support, mentoring and coaching is difficult to see in the context of overwhelm. It is a critical for any leaders’ success to develop strategies utilizing support networks, mentors and coaches to work constructively to cope with overwhelm. A leader can’t do it alone – the core competency of collaboration is essential to success in 21st century leadership.
Coaching
Get clear on the source:
- Identify – list every issue you can think of on a piece of paper;
- Determine importance – determine the most important issues, rank them from first to last.
Provide Structure:
Prioritize – put in order the first to last issue;
- Select – choose the top three to five issues to begin work on;
- Plan – determine the top three action step to take on each of the top five issues;
- Schedule – enter the action-steps on your To-Do list with due dates.
Create support:
- take a few moments each day to practice perspective – step outside your role and view your leadership from various angles;
- seek opportunities to reflect on your personal well-being , ask yourself, “How am I feeling about what’s going on? What do I need right now? Who can support me in what I need to accomplish?”;
- contact your coach and begin the inquiry into next steps and options.
