Setting our development goals for the year

Like so many of you at the start of the new year, I am focused on my personal and leadership development goals.

However, my journey to identify key areas to focus on started before any new year’s resolutions. A few months ago, I found myself needing to regroup in how I was working with others.

While patience and moving slowly have never been my strong points, these and other issues worsened over the past year. I was not showing up as my best self or letting my true light shine. In fact, I found myself often feeling angry, frustrated, and tired.

As my coach put it so nicely. “There are no issues with WHAT you do. You are competent at what you are doing and continue to learn every day. What we need to focus on is HOW you get work done.”

In most performance or leadership development plans, we too often focus on the what. What are our revenue goals, our product plans, and our core marketing initiatives.

Often, we need to focus instead on how we are working with others. Of course, this is harder to measure and doesn’t look as good in a Tableau dashboard. However, it is just as vital as a key performance indicator. It is also harder, as it takes a great deal of self-awareness and humility.

In the spirit of transparency, and to hold myself accountable, I am sharing my development priorities and goals with you.

Really listening to leadership development feedback

The first discussion of a potential need to refocus on my “how” came from our executive consultants at Egon Zehnder. As part of their work, the consultants interviewed many people across the company who currently work with me or have done so in the past: my peers, other colleagues, and senior leaders.

From these interviews, they aggregated the most common terms and words people used to describe me and my leadership. As expected, these fell into two buckets: positive descriptions and opportunities for growth.

I am naturally an optimist and glass half full person, so let’s start with the positive.

Positive descriptions include the following: 

• Inspiring
• Action-focused
• Accountable
• Impactful
• Passionate
• Galvanizing
• Change Agent
• Customer focused
• High energy
• Smart

This is fairly consistent with the feedback I’ve received throughout my career, and I would say aligns with my own goals.

Focusing on critical leadership development areas

Of course, there is the other side of the coin that rose just as strongly.

Input that outlined my key development areas includes: 

• Impatient
• Moves too fast
• Goes it alone
• Forgets to collaborate
• Doesn’t always listen
• Galvanizing (I think this word goes in both places -as this can be good, or bad)
• Aggressive

My first response to this is: Ouch.

However, to be honest, none of this surprises me. My entire life, professionally and personally, I received feedback around needing to slow down, be more patient, and let others catch up.

Listening, while something I can do well, and which I constantly remind myself to focus on, remains a challenge. My brain fires on all cylinders.

Therefore, it was time for some hard self talk. At this stage of my life and career I really do need to listen to this coaching. I must focus on how I interact with others and how I get things done.

Most importantly, using my own vernacular, is I need to make sure my true, positive light is always shining on others.

In my opinion, the key is improving my How without losing my edge, so to speak. My authenticity, energy, and passion enables me to drive impact. Achieving impact is what gives me life. However, I must absolutely be able to have an impact with any negative aftershocks.

What is your leadership brand?

Here is what I wrote as the leadership brand I want to achieve, combining the current positive and the aspirational improvements to the challenge areas. This maintains the current positive aspects of my brand and incorporates changes noted in the areas for improvement.

Margaret is an inspiring, smart leader who champions customers, associates, and initiatives to create greater success for teams and the company. Margaret is a courageous, collaborative, and compassionate leader who listens to understand and holds everyone accountable for behaviors and outcomes.  

 

What is your desired leadership brand? And what would you say it is today?

The How builds on your personal Why

Over the past few years, I have done a lot of work on my Why. You can think of your Why as your purpose for being.

In the book Start with Why, Simon Sinek explains why organizations need to understand and declare their Why. He defines the Why as the very reason an organization exists.

However, I also love using his model on a personal level.

My Why is:

To inspire and empower others to realize their full potential and shine their true light!

 

I work hard to live my Why through coaching, mentoring, and championing new ideas. Also, I think my Why shines when I work to help customers and partners be more successful, and through my sponsorship of diversity and inclusion initiatives both within and outside of my company.

In crafting my Why Statement, I leaned on my core values, which I worked on a few years previously.

I find both of these exercises amazingly helpful in ensuring you stay grounded in who you are at all times. In addition to organizations, I believe leaders need to establish a clear Why.

Creating a leadership development mission statement

Drawing from the work I did around my Why, and incorporating input from others, I decided to create a mission statement.

Appropriately, this mission statement speaks to my How.

Margaret will be the inspiring leader and change agent the company needs her to be, using the power of her authentic style, while minimizing the side effects of that power, and bringing everyone along on the journey.

 

Further, I outlined how I will achieve that mission by doing more of the following:

• Listening with intention
• Holding the space for others to do their own thinking & processing
• Asking out of curiosity
• Transparency of information
• Maintaining an “open door” to anyone who wants to meet with me
• Championing new ideas or plans
• Taking time to understand the complete picture
• Bringing all teams to the table early

Doing more of the good versus less of the bad

My coach presented this great idea of focusing on doing more of a behavior described as good rather than doing less of a bad behavior.

Often, we will emphasize what we need to do less, such as stop talking so much or not being negative. However, you can take those same concepts and flip them into positive “more” statements. For example, I will listen more. Or, I will take an optimistic approach.

While simple, this switch from less to more is a revelation to me. It is absolutely a “bit flip” for my brain, making all the development work feel positive rather than punitive.

In fact, I’ve started using this in my own coaching and mentoring. It’s a powerful practice.

The Four C’s of my new brand

Since I am a marketer, I always look for ways to simplify a message or story. One of my favorite things to do is to turn multiple words or sentences into an acrostic to make them easier to remember. Or, I will use the same first letter of each main word as repetition also helps with memory.

Therefore, in thinking about my leadership brand, I came up with my four C’s.

They are:

Compassionate

Courageous

Collaborative

Customer-centric

 

Based on the feedback, the one I need to work on the most is Collaborative.

6 Key leadership development priorities

From all of this I developed six key priorities for my personal and leadership development, all focused on how I do things.

1. How I show up
2. How I observe
3. How I communicate
4. How I get things done and make decisions
5. How I develop and grow relationships
6. How I empower greater diversity & inclusivity

As I am also a big fan of OKRs, I created a scorecard for these six priorities, with key actions and measures of success for each. Although for much of this, the data will be subjective, which means I will ask for input and honest evaluation from others to score myself.

Holding space for others to process

This concept of “space” is another area introduced by my coach that really resonated with me. I am able to analogize this to how I feel during meditation, when there is quiet space in my head. In those times, I do not feel the need to rush, speak, or move.

She explained the concept of holding space is a way for me to give others the time to figure out a solution or to process input. Oftentimes, when I receive input or a problem, I am quick to process and come up with multiple solutions. Or, when a question is posed, my brain is ready to answer in multiple ways.

However, when I just wait and let others process the input or question, another person will usually come to a solution or answer that is just as good. It may not be exactly my solution or addressed in the same way, but it still works.

This reminds me of one of my early management lessons. When an associate is working on a project, I learned to focus on a shared definition of success rather than worry about how that person might get to the end result.

This way, I give the person space and time to figure it out on their terms and to achieve the goal in their way. If they need help, they can ask for it, but my goal is still to help them solve it their own way, not mine.

In fact, this is always part of my coaching to new managers to help them learn how not to micromanage.

With my development plan, I need to translate this long-used management practice into every interaction.

My new leadership development mantra

I found a wonderful quote I leave you with that speaks to my geek brain and helps me visualize this key goal I have in my leadership development.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response, lies our growth and our freedom.”

Viktor Frankl

 

I wish you good luck with your 2021 leadership development goals. Would love to hear what you are focusing on this year.