Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

Increasing Your Influence

Do You Suffer from Executive Isolation?

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Do You Suffer from Executive Isolation?
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Who is in your tribe?

It matters, if you want to remain effective and relevant as a leader.

If remaining so is important to you, you need a tribe that provides you with the nourishment you need to flourish. This tribe should fully support you in your endeavors. And it should also challenge when you do less than your best you so that you continue to strengthen your ability to lead.

Without this kind of tribe, leaders feel isolated and alone. They buy in to the false adage that “it’s lonely at the top.”

That stoicism will damage a leader’s ability to lead.

If this is you – if you are suffering from executive isolation – it is time to form your tribe.

Can you identify with any of the following?

  • 60% of all leaders quietly admit they didn’t feel fully prepared for their new role, and that it was necessary to hide this in order to build credibility with others. They reported feeling lonely and unsure because of a lack of support. If this is you, remember to differentiate between your ability to lead and the fact that there is a learning curve to any new role
  • Leaders must make tough decisions that others might not understand, so they do not feel free to share these or discuss them with others. They have nowhere they can take this to brainstorm and come up with creative solutions. If this is you, you are compromising your decision-making abilities and leadership effectiveness.
  • Leaders must hold a lot of confidential and/or sensitive information. This is stressful and burdensome, promoting a feeling of isolation. If this is you, the cost of this kind of stress can be far-reaching and hamper your ability to perform.
  • No leader has all the answers, but they seldom share this fact because they want their employees to have confidence in them and in the direction the company is headed. This is you, if you feel the need to keep significant thoughts and feelings to yourself.

Executive isolation – the dynamic that arises from the situations described above – is insidiously damaging to one’s leadership effectiveness.

A personal tribe for the leader is the solution.

Being part of a tribe where you can take your fears, doubts, and foibles, seems foreign to the person in power. How does that work for the person at the top? And what does it look like?

Here are the needed ingredients for a leader’s tribe (or for any tribe, for that matter!):

1. Nourishment

A leader’s tribe must provide nourishment in the form of healthy ways of relating, healthy connections, and deep and genuine bonds. Human connection is necessary to sustain life, and healthy human connection is necessary to support your highest and best.

2. Confidentiality

Respect for your situation and your stories is paramount. Feeling as though you can trust your tribe with all your “stuff” allows you to fully divulge what you need to without fear of compromise.

3. Support

Bringing deepest thoughts, fears, doubts, and aspirations can feel risky – yet every human being, no matter how accomplished, has them. Your vulnerability should be met by your tribe with genuine support so that you feel acknowledged, accepted, and able to confront where needed.

4. Challenge

Your tribe should love you where you are, and yet love you too much to allow you to stagnate there. You need to be challenged to grow, to smoothen rough edges, and to be called out when you are playing small. Frank feedback with love and respect is invaluable to your ability as leader to flourish and move successfully into the future.

5. Accountability

Your tribe should have your best interests in mind by holding you to your commitments. This is how true and lasting growth can best occur. If you do not have a source that provides this for you, the potential in you will go sadly untapped.

Leaders feel lonely and assume this is par for the course. Yet the right social connection with trusted tribe makes all the difference in how you can evoke continuous and honest growth in your ability to lead.

Who is in your tribe?

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

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Three Things a Leader Needs to Get the Mojo Back

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Three Things a Leader Needs to Get the Mojo Back
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Leading is challenging.

But it should also be energizing and exciting.

If you as leader have lost the drive you used to feel, take heart – there are three things you need to focus on in order to get back on top of your game.

In fact, if your actions don’t inspire, motivate, and empower, it is time to regroup.

Inspire

When your employees are inspired, great things happen. People follow inspiration. As you inspire, your workforce feels a sense of belonging and commitment, and they become more engaged and productive.

And, lest you think you must be charismatic in order to be inspirational, take heart. In a recent employee poll, traits such as humility, empathy, openness, and high regard for others were named among the 33 traits identified as being inspirational (Eric Garton – “How to Be an Inspiring Leader,” Harvard Business Review, April 2017 ).

Motivate

When you bring passion and positive energy to your workforce, you spread an infectious attitude that supports high morale and keeps stress at lower levels.

Incentivizing your employees to do their very best goes far beyond offering higher wages. Find out what motivates your executive team members (hint: each will have something different to share). Things like feeling a part of the company’s success, learning to move a career ahead, personal development to step into higher personal leadership, receiving acknowledgement and recognition in a certain way – these are just a few examples of what really motivates people.

Do this – and teach your team to do likewise with their own teams. You’ll create an incredibly motivated workforce and a higher level of retention.

Empower

Demonstrate trust. Clarify the ends instead of the means, provide them with any non-negotiable parameters, and then let them spread their wings.

Explore where you can delegate, outline your expectations as far as results, and simply be on hand for questions.

Don’t know where to start? Ask them. What projects or responsibilities might they like to assume in order to flex their leadership skills?

And here’s a question I use with my clients to help them think outside the box: If you decided to take a six-month sabbatical, what would you need to delegate in order to feel that the company could move ahead as per usual?

If you will work on these three areas, you will find that you have not only reanimated your workforce, you will also recapture your own drive and commitment to lead. A win-win.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Three Ways Humility Can Make You a Better Leader

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Three Ways Humility Can Make You a Better Leader
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Rick Warren once said, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”

In a business world where ego has often been confused with strength and vision, proposing humility as a leadership trait has, in the past, been difficult to accept. Yet today, we realize that in order to lead well and make impact, bringing out the best in others by putting their interests and the interests of the company first is paramount.

This requires leaving your ego at the door.

Top-down leadership is, in fact, outdated and counterproductive. In the business world, we have witnessed terrible situations where this approach has gotten out of hand, and ego has given way to hurting many people on a large scale: Martin Wintercorn and the Volkswagen scandal, Hisao Tanaka of Toshiba, Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharamaceuticals… (For more about this, see my article “Beware of Hubris Syndrome.”)

Through these situations and many other lessons learned, leading with humility is paramount.

Today, even when a company’s organizational chart still resembles a pyramid, the roles and responsibilities throughout the enterprise call for leadership at every level.

Ownership and autonomy are fostered up, down, and sideways throughout the enterprise. Accountability is still king, but the difference now is that it is mutual. Shared decision-making is embraced. A culture where the people come first naturally produces best outcomes because it promotes in the workforce the feelings of trust, purpose, motivation, and engagement.

Since humility creates the type of environment that is needed for the organization of the future, we must intentionally incorporate it into leading. Being selfless with the larger agenda of leading an organization and primarily concerned with the well-being of the organization and the people in it is what works.

Here are three ways your own leadership can become even more impactful with humility.

1. Stop micromanaging, and empower your people.

Where are you hoarding a “top-down” attitude in your leadership?

Do you find yourself reticent to delegate because others might not do it as well as you? This is an indication that you are not empowering your team – and this means you are short-changing the company. I’ve coached many executives and business owners who fear letting go. If this is you, come up with a plan to mentor so that you can effectively support the present as well as the future.

2. Listen and learn to model personal growth.

Keep yourself on an honest and supportive growth journey by joining or forming a group of like-minded leaders who are willing to share, introspect, encourage, and hold each other accountable.

Be open to the ideas and perspectives of others in your company and receive feedback as a gift and not a criticism. Modeling your own growth allows others to embrace their own development opportunities and fosters a strong and productive learning culture.

3. Admit your mistakes and course-correct.

Are you avoiding having to deal with a poor strategic move? Perhaps you have hired a key individual who has turned out to be toxic. Or it may be that you have turned the company’s attention to a new initiative that is damaging its ability to deliver services or products to your current customers.

If you are sending out messages such as, “That’s just the way he is – just work as best you can,” or “Once we get through this, things should settle down,” you are modeling avoidance.

Instead, model accountability to them and the organization. Decide on a plan to course-correct, and implement it. Show your people that it is human to make mistakes – and that it is true leadership to deal with them and learn from them.

Humility is not being servile or weak.

It is being strong and confident enough to keep your focus on the bigger purpose and all that goes into making this a success. And that is true leadership.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Five Reasons Your Team May Not Be Candid With You

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Five Reasons Your Team May Not Be Candid With You
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How engaged is your team? Do the team members come in every day, energized, committed and excited about the work you are doing together? Are they huddled in groups brainstorming and coming up with new ideas?

Or do you get the feeling they need a vitamin shot? Are they sitting around with a second cup of coffee waiting for you to direct them?

What’s the problem?

If your team engagement is low, or its creative juices have dried up, your team members may have decided they just can’t be candid with you.

Why would they think that?

Here are some chief reasons employees aren’t candid with their leader:

1. You suffer from one-way thinking.

Are you really open to other perspectives, or do all your meetings end with your ideas as the only sound ones? If you aren’t open to encouraging and appreciating the ideas of others, people will quickly detect this and shut down. After all – why contribute when it doesn’t ever go anywhere? You will eventually surround yourself with people who simply agree to your ideas, and lose out on the brain trust you have in the room.

2. You don’t do feedback well.

If you don’t genuinely listen for the “gold” in growth opportunities, you are missing out. Your team members may have tried to give you helpful criticism in the past, but if they were met with defensiveness or denial, they will back off and stop trying to work on a better working relationship with you.

3. You’re a self-perceived super hero.

You don’t allow others to contribute. Your mantra is, “I need to start delegating more,” or, “When I ask others to help with X, Y, or Z, I get sub-par work back. It’s easier to do it myself.” If this is you, you aren’t developing your people and taking advantage of their ability to contribute. This will absolutely kill motivation in others.

4. You don’t include them.

You don’t bring others along in the process. If you don’t provide regular and meaningful updates to developments in the company and team initiatives, you aren’t empowering your people to stretch their critical thinking skills about how this affects what they are doing. If you find yourself simply telling people what to do all the time, you are probably guilty of this.

5. You’re a perfectionist.

Do you tend to come across as critical or judgmental, or demand perfection the first time around (ask your spouse or significant other if you don’t know – he or she will tell you!)? If so, you aren’t leaving room for your team to consider failures as learning points, and creative ideas as possible innovation for your company. Your team will tend to play safe and play small, so that you get smaller, safer work that appears perfect. But you will lose out on the new and innovative ideas and work they might bring. Consider this: Life, work, and leading are not about you and everything else being perfect. It’s about all this being exceptional.

If you suspect that your team is holding back, not being genuine, have a conversation with them. Ask them what they need in order to be more candid – and be prepared to receive their feedback as your own point of learning.

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Five Reasons Executive Coaching Experiences Fail

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Five Reasons Executive Coaching Experiences Fail
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You realize that developing your leadership and that of your team gives you a competitive advantage. After all, behavior is what drives your company’s strategy, structure, culture, and systems.

You are also starkly aware that what got you to this point won’t carry you into the future. In this complex world, a commitment to developing talent at all levels of the enterprise is not a nice idea – it’s a necessity.

Where do you start? You’ll want to model from the top, and so you are probably thinking that a first good step would be to hire a coach for you and key members of your executive team.

Executive coaching has been highly recommended to you as leader as the best answer to your development.  You’ve read the statistics and they sound promising. The ROI for executive coaching has a healthy average of 7 to 10 times the investment, with some even reporting up to 49 times.

But you have a nagging doubt that has kept you from making a move to start the process. What if it doesn’t work for you? You’ve heard of a couple of stories where another decision-maker’s coaching experience didn’t meet expectations. Wasted time, energy, and money.

How can you make sure you get the same great results you keep reading about – and move confidently as you meet the future, now?

Here are 5 reasons that executives might not get the kind of return you read about – and how to start out right so that you can make an investment that pays off well for you.

Five Reasons Executive Coaching Experiences Fail

1. You don’t know what kind of coach you need.

Opening a coaches’ directory will reveal different kinds of coaches, and the choice can be overwhelming. Here are the three primary types of coaches so that you can see the difference:

a. Life coach – focuses on the whole person, personal and professional goals, aspects of life such as health, wellness, personal finances, life direction, and more.

b. Business coach – brings processes, tools, and concepts to team and enterprise growth (business coach and business consultant are closely related with quite a bit of overlap). Works on a variety of goals, including strategy, marketing, overall performance, and more.

c. Executive coach – helps unlock leadership potential, facilitating change in someone’s personal behavior that will ultimately result in achieving business goals. Executive coaches are typically hired to help C-suite, VPs and other executives with setting, supporting, and achieving personal improvement goals. Examples of focus can include developing greater leadership skills, managing staff, improving communication, managing conflict well, increasing productivity, increased agility, decision-making, and more.

2. Your coach doesn’t have the formal training and certification to be most effective.

Has your coach had the benefit of a robust accredited coaching program that utilizes proven methodologies for best adult learning and development?  And are they certified with the International Coach Federation or similar accrediting body so that you can be sure they meet highest standards in ethics and in practice?

3. Your coach doesn’t use a solid model and framework for results.

Unless your coach can use a solid model and process that keeps you focused on the goals you set with them, keeps you moving forward, allows you to assess progress as you move forward, and has the ability to truly measure outcomes, then you will not be able to bank on best results.

4. Your coach can’t meet you at your level to provide the support you need.

Coaches vary in their own levels of personal development and leadership experience. A coach does not need your industry background, or to have held the same position you now hold. However, they need to be able to help you navigate your growth and understanding where you are in your development and how you meet the world is vital to their asking the right questions to do so. The coach’s own leadership background, as well as their past client roster and client testimonials should be helpful indicators as to whether they can support you well in this regard.

5. You aren’t willing to do the work.

Change is challenging, and it requires great courage and vulnerability to look at one’s own “growing edges.” Many clients have hired coaches, only to go through the motions and not give the initiative the focus necessary to truly develop self. If you recognize that you are ready to step into a higher level of leadership, make the commitment to do the work. The results are life-changing when you give it 100%.

In order to manage well in an ever-evolving, complex world, having an able thought partner who helps you to see the landscape and navigate well is priceless. The ROI of executive coaching can be a game-changer for you, your team, and the company, if you are confident in how to go about selecting a coach, and if you make a strong commitment to change.