Executive Coaching
Today I want to talk to the executives and entrepreneurs out there about the ways in which we take our psychology to work with us. Listen, we all do it, but the sooner we recognize the impact that it has on our leadership style and our relationships with our direct reports, as well as our performance, well then the sooner we are able to set ourselves up for optimal results.
I want to share with you the three most common ways that I see my clients’ interpersonal psychology impacting them as leaders.
The first factor is your thinking style. We know per research that there are four different thinking styles and the ones you prefer to operate in will inform the facts that you tend to. They will also determine which facts you’re likely to neglect and overlook because we tend to have blind spots around the thinking styles that we are not strong in.
As a result that can create a lot of miscommunication among us and our teams and it can also just create this general misalignment when we feel like we don’t understand each other’s core concerns. So, it’s ideal to identify what your thinking styles are so that you can start playing to your strengths and then start controlling for your blind spots.
Factor number two is your comfort level with sticky conversations. Your history with conflict is going to affect how you show up when it’s time to hold someone accountable or confront them or have a challenging dialogue. A lot of us unintentionally show up in a non-ideal way either coming across too abrasively during conflict or swinging in the other direction in which we are so vague that we are unclear and we fail to hold employees accountable because of our own discomfort with the confrontation. It’s ideal to learn how to approach these conversations with confidence and how to identify the right among of flexibility for that particular situation.
Finally is factor number three, your saboteurs. These are your unique insecurities. They’re different from one person to the next and they take on 10 different personalities that influence you through negative thoughts.
They include:
- a judge who’s rather judgemental of other people’s performance
- a controller who is very anxiety riddled and insists on having their finger in too many pies,
- a hypervigilant who is also anxiety riddled and always on the lookout for something bad to happen
- and a people pleaser who is overly concerned with the needs or concerns of others
Here’s a common example: A founder and owner is a people pleaser and accepts too great a volume of incoming work for their team. They do so because they want to accommodate all of their customers beating down the door but it, not only fries the founder/owner, pulling them out of leadership and forcing them to do the work but it also burns out their team with chronic overwork to the point where retention will become an issue.
Clearly, it is ideal to recognize where our saboteurs are at play inside of our leadership, our team, and our organization so that we can really cap and limit the influence that they have over us. In my work with leaders and entrepreneurs, we always get to enhance their self-awareness on these issues, give them radical clarity on which expectations are realistic and which are far from realistic, and empower them with new tools to do it more effectively.
As we develop ourselves, we become more effective leaders and of course, it is an effective leader who is going to have the greatest chance at orchestrating a high-performance team, driving results, and retaining key talent.
To learn more about Flourish’s services and your Saboteurs click here.