“I DON’T WANT TO BE LIKE YOU.
I DON’T WANT TO THINK LIKE YOU.
I’M GOING TO BE LIKE ME”
- Sir Bob Geldoff (1976)
Business I have always felt has an identity all of its own, it’s difficult to understand it untill you get to work with many different people in many different organisations; in the guise of the Executive Coaching Guru, I have been privileged to work with hundreds of senior managers and leaders on leadership development programmes and executive coaching interventions; and one thing keeps coming up and that’s that the business makes demands!
Now the business is of course made up of managers who are in essence ‘making the demands’ but even they end up saying, “the business makes demands”, as if the business is in itself bestowed with its own identity, as if the business itself is sentient and calculating and maybe it is, maybe in some ways when groups of individuals come together there is an agreed group consciousness that bestows ‘personality to the business’ rather like owners of pets who anthropomorthise (the attribution of human characteristics to non-human animal or non-living things, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts) their dogs and cats, then perhaps the same thing can be done for business as an entity.
What does this mean? Well if we allow ourselves to create an entity that doesn’t actually exist, if we empower the story of a ‘They’ and ‘It’, then we as leaders are weakened by the fact that we acknowledge a power over ourselves that doesn’t in fact exist. This is very important stuff! It goes to the heart of enabling people to be themselves, to have their own characters, characteristics, foibles and in some respects their own oddities.
When we as leaders seek to stifle the individual quirkiness, to knock out the ‘human being, from the human doing’ I know it is from the fear of the what ‘They’ will think, when in reality what is really happening is the personal fear of loosing ones own personality as people are over whelmed by the workload of email, project management, people management and politic.
I work with people who are excellent at their jobs, who generally speaking are good people, who care about others, though often this circle of care has shrunk to a very small circle with family and sometimes line reports in it, this is the ever-growing pressure that many feel to conform and as one executive put it, “I have become beige!”
Leaders enable not just the intellectual and business skills growth, but true leaders, the ones that are reveried, remembered and referenced enable the people within the business to grow as people, to learn how to operate in a commercial context whilst not ‘hiding’ their identity, but overtly bringing it to the work place to add even greater value.
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Do I welcome character in the interactions in the team/business?
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Do I show my own?
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Do I give room to my character and others in conversation?
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Do I create space for the growth of character with work and factor that into development?
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Do I understand the difference between character and personality? (“Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character” – Mr Wolf.Film-”Pulp Fiction”)
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Do I blame the business for defining the culture in my own environment?
Filed under: executive coaching, leadership behaviour Tagged: | leadership behaviour, leadership change, leadership coach, leadership models, leadership presence, leadership quotes, leadership research, leadership skills, leadership thinking, situational leadership
Before I read this post, I had a simplistic view of what a good leader is. The discussion on the saying “the business makes demands” has made it complicated for me. Had to read it twice to see if I understood it right. I do now. Thanks.
Bravo! Indeed allowing people to grow is most critic if you truly seek to be an effective leader.