Are You A Balanced Leader?
Leaders must maintain a balance between two things with the people they lead: the task maintenance and the relationship maintenance. The task (who will do what by when for whom, for what price, etc.) is traceable for the evidence as to how well it’s going is measurable and often physical. The relationship (how decisions are going to be made, how the hierarchy plays out, how different personalities mix with one another, how to communicate with a diverse group of people) side of leading people is a little more slippery and not as easy to nail down, for people are complex, not always transparent and difficult to measure.
There are consultants who offer expert advice on how to produce a business plan or how to use a certain operating system. Those consultants are there to help leaders with task oriented issues. I am here to help with the relational side of leadership issues. Rather than offer expert advice, I help business leaders and managers to surface and proactively deal with issues that are hampering the relationship side of achieving business goals. To do this, I work at two levels in my client’s organization.
The first level of work I do is leadership coaching. This is where I work directly with my clients around issues they are having as leaders. These include goal clarity/setting, increasing their capacities to communicate with the diverse members of their teams, managing transitions, resolving conflicts in the workplace and most of all, recognizing their leadership strengths and giving them tools with which to work on their growth edges.
The next level is group-process consulting. Here, I go out into the organization to do investigative work. With the buy-in of upper leadership, I interview each of the players in the work team to allow them an anonymous platform from which to vent their concerns. I look for trends in what I hear and in a meeting with both leadership and the work team I deliver the information (again, anonymously) back to the entire group. This serves to give leadership a clear picture of how things look from different levels in the organization. This is particularly powerful work because in any hierarchical organization, some key communication stalls at different levels of the organization. The work I do at this level feeds into my coaching work for in the course of the interviews leadership strengths and growth edges are often illuminated.