Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

visionary thinking

How Do You Hold Your Leadership Accountable?

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How Do You Hold Your Leadership Accountable?

Leading While Getting Things Done

In a former corporate life, I was privileged to lead a team of 15 amazing people to raise lots of money. Millions. In fact, we were able to reach organizational goals previously impossible, and the future looked bright. I was told higher leadership was in store for me.

But there came a point when I started to experience burnout, and the fallout nearly did me in.

Reaching the goal had been great affirmation. Creating and implementing a strategic plan with right players and process to meet financial needs had been exciting. But over time, continually chasing that carrot turned into drudgery. The fact was, in my effort to make sure our team did the impossible, I focused exclusively on departmental and organizational metrics and outcomes – and neglected my personal leadership entirely.

And when you do that, things fall apart.

If you are pushing process, proposals, meetings, trainings – you name it – but you are not holding yourself accountable for your personal leadership growth, your shelf life as a viable entity will be short.

Oh, sure, you can coast for a while, but the erosion to your motivation, and then, to your performance, will begin to show. And suddenly, instead of leading, you’ll find yourself going through the rote motions of just getting things done.

How do you avoid this? How do you hold yourself accountable for your leadership development while you are handling impossible deadlines, goals, and outcomes?

I teach and coach individuals and teams around this, and the model can be simplified to just three steps:

  1. Mindset

This has to do with the beliefs you hold around your leadership abilities. Who are you as a leader, and what does this look like? What impact does your leadership make on those around you at the individual, team/relational, and organizational/global levels?

Holding yourself accountable:  How will you know when you are successful in this? What will it look like? Feel like? What are you doing when you are successful?

  1. Knowledge

What top values and strengths will you use to earmark your leadership? If you have identified these, how are you using them?

Holding yourself accountable:  How will you know when you are operating from core strengths and values? What is different about your work? Your energy? Your personal, team, and organizational outcomes? What do you need to change in order to open the gateway for these to happen successfully?

  1. Action

Daily. Flexing your competence strengthens your abilities – and your confidence!  Incorporating your mindset and knowledge into an intentional approach will keep you aligned and effective.

Holding yourself accountable: Keep a list of your core strengths and values at your desk as a handy visible reference. Then, review your 12-month action plan and ask how your leadership, its core strengths and values, will manifest and mold the outcomes. Be specific and write these down. There is power in putting this to paper. After this, drop back to your 90-day action plan to do the same. Now that you have given definition to how this should look, feel, manifest, ask yourself how you will do a weekly review of how you are measuring up over the next few weeks until this becomes an engrained approach.

When have you noticed your own leadership faltering? What has worked for you? Jump over to our LinkedIn group discussion and share!

How Effective Is Your Decision-Making?

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Can you afford to make poor decisions?

I doubt many of you feel that you can. In addition to the immediate results you seek, the decisions you make today have bearing on the opportunities you enjoy tomorrow. Moreover, if you are leading others or even an entity, the decisions you make affect a great number of lives and futures.

So how do you check in to see whether your decision-making needs a tune-up?

The simple answer is to ask yourself the following questions:

  • Are you reaching your goals?
  • Are you outperforming the competition?
  • Are you influencing others at a high level?
  • Are you ready to meet the future?

Rate yourself below to see if you need a tune-up in your decision-making process.

  1. I use a well-defined process to make my decisions.
  2. I seek to identify the real problem before I begin to make a decision.
  3. I weigh the pros, cons, and risks carefully before making decisions.
  4. I include key stakeholders in the decision-making process, even if this will slow down the process or require a great deal of consensus-building.
  5. In my thought process, I tend to use language such as “how might this happen,” rather than, “this can’t happen because…”
  6. If I doubt the final decision, I stop to re-evaluate my assumptions and decision-making process.
  7. Others see me as an excellent problem-solver and seek to include me in significant decisions.

Where do you need to tune up your own decision-making process? I’d love to hear about your own experience!

Click here to join the LinkedIn discussion on this topic.

The Problem With Women and Visionary Thinking

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Women are limiting their own progress by not considering themselves as “visionary thinkers,” according to researchers Ibarra and Obodaru.  In fact, these professionals reveal that the female majority does not value the more abstract “visionary” thinking as much as they value their practical orientation toward solving problems.

This is a game-changer, if we want to elevate women to higher leadership.  It means that even if you are a highly-successful female professional, you are no doubt keeping yourself from an even more incredible future, simply because you may not be developing your visionary thinking.

Vision is the driver for inspiring and engaging your team to move forward together with purpose.  It’s the foundation for creativity and innovation.   Lifting your thinking from simply what’s in front of you to a world of possibilities is necessary to help you and your company remain relevant and positioned for the future.

So if you are a woman who seeks to expand your leadership capacity, you must cultivate visionary thinking as part of your toolkit.

Here are 5 steps to help you begin to make this shift:

  1. Make room for creative space. Schedule this on your calendar regularly, and give yourself permission to daydream, and to dive deep. This may be a big shift for you if you are accustomed to operating from a “get-it-done” mindset.  Recognize that without this space to look beyond what is, you will remain right where you are.  And if you find it is a challenge to make this happen at the office, schedule yourself outside the office for it.  This is foundational.
  2. Make your creative thoughts relevant. How might the ideas you come up with relate to your company, and to your own leadership?  If you catch yourself limiting ideas because of current practices or parameters, ask yourself what might be possible if these were not limiters.
  3. Leverage your thinking and creative process with a brain trust. Utilize the concept of brain trust, forming a small circle of trusted professionals both inside and outside of your industry to discuss ideas.  This one move not only supports synergy, but also begins to develop a forward-thinking network to incubate ideas and innovation.
  4. Develop your outside-in lens. As you go about your daily work, approach it with new eyes.  If you were looking at your company or initiative from the outside, how would what you see compare to what could be?
  5. Disrupt the rules of engagement. Challenge process and protocol.  Ask why, when your team opts for the standard, preferred way of doing.  Ask why not, when you hear someone saying that it simply can’t be done.  Mix up your taskforces, hold meetings in unconventional spots when you want creative thinking.  What else can you switch up that disrupts the status quo?

Cultivating visionary thinking is not an overnight switch.  Developing new habits to shift mindset take time.  But the results are worth it, if you are ready to get from where you are, to where you want to be.  I challenge you to begin cultivating your visionary thinking, and to let me know what shifts you are experiencing.

“The possibilities that tomorrow brings are proportional to the beliefs you hold about them.”  – Patti Cotton