Along with a lot of the leaders I am coaching, I am finding myself stretched these days. It’s good to be busy, and busy tips easily into overwhelmed. The usual remedies – delegate, say no, set good boundaries, time-management, disciplined focus – only go so far.
I turned to this lovely passage from The One Who is Not Busy by Darlene Cohen. She is talking about how our way of viewing our activity is itself a source of anxiety.
If you lead, there’s a high chance that you got there as an outgrowth of your technical professional skills. Often, it’s the most experienced, the most proficient, and sometimes the most loyal (!) who is asked to lead the team. Many people believe you need to be a technical expert to gain leadership credibility. What’s called “expert power” does indeed give credibility, but a limited kind which can go stale in a minute these days. No one disputes they’d like their leader to understand what they are doing – the challenges,
I’ve always found it fun, and intellectually stimulating, to work alongside other professionals in my field. In the early days of my career I was lucky to land in teams that were focused on creating great work together with a minimum of competitive drama. Later, as a consultant to HR teams, it was hit-and-miss. Some teams welcomed a partnership, others looked at me as a threatening outsider.
These days I’m offering a new service to HR practitioners, which I call “Colleague Calls”.
As a Coach, I’m most often working with clients on getting unstuck. As a person, I get stuck too. Recently I made headway on something important to me. It was a visceral reminder of the steps that we can take to make progress on even the most difficult changes.
All my life, I’ve wanted to write fiction. As a child, stories had flowed from my hand. Then, for a myriad of reasons (some material, most unconscious) I gave it up.
Emotions at work are on public display these days, whether it’s Serena slamming her tennis racquet to the ground or Kavanaugh yelling at the Senate during his job interview. It makes for interesting news, for sure. And it makes me, a Leadership Coach, think more about the role of emotions at work.
Daniel Goleman’s seminal work on Emotional Intelligence gave HR professionals a way to talk about “soft skills”. EQ frameworks and assessments followed. The EQi 2.0 includes these factors: self-perception,
