Most people are promoted to positions of leadership based on their accomplishments as an individual contributor. As they continue to move up the ranks through the years that follow, absent any significant focus on developing themselves as leaders, their outmoded tactics and strategies for “leading” become liabilities—or at least fail to act as the assets they could be—and their performance is less than stellar. Call it the law of self-inflicted diminishing returns.
After all, most leaders are not victims—they chose to be in positions of leadership either consciously or by default.
Not only have I experienced this diminishing return effect as an executive myself (prior to becoming a coach,) but noticed it in some form or another with most of my executive clients. They tell me:
- “I’ve been at it for 30 years. A number of years after I got the top job in this place, I realized that I had no idea how to actually BE a leader. Before I move on, I’d like to know that I’ve done everything I can to be a great leader.”
- “Once I got the feedback about my leadership capabilities from the 360-degree assessment, and saw where I compared to other leaders in the benchmark data, I was shocked into action. I had been using things I learned 20 years ago as a manager of a small department, and wondering all the while why I wasn’t doing as well as I used to do.”
- “I felt like a fraud. If they only knew I had no idea what I was really doing—that I was “leading” by the seat of my pants—they’d run me out of here in a New York minute.”
Because this is so prevalent among “leaders,” it’s become a main message to potential clients in my executive coaching practice.
It resonates. As Marshall Goldsmith famously titled his book “What got you here won’t get you there.” The sad part is that many “leaders” fail to realize this until later, or not at all.
Just because someone is in a leadership role doesn’t magically make them practice optimal leadership behavior. Experience and “training” are helpful, but there’s nothing like some focused work with a leader to help them see their own part of what’s not working, and make changes to their own beliefs and behaviors, to unlock potential, upgrade performance, and, reassuringly, to help them know they are doing everything they can to be a leader.
I suppose it seems self-serving for a coach to talk about this, but coaching isn’t as well known as, say, dentistry. After all, is it self-serving for a dentist to say, “Most clients don’t practice very good dental care, and if this goes on, they tend to lose their teeth. There’s nothing like routing dental work to keep the choppers in good shape!”?
The great news is that with a great leadership assessment up front , along with a period of coaching (I prefer a year, but take six month engagements) that includes minimal participation of others, like the leader’s direct reports, peers (if there are any peers), and boss or board, a leader can really come into their own. It’s why I do what I do, and an honor to be a part of their process.
Not everyone in a leadership role is ready to work on themselves in this very focused way. Assessing that honestly is up to the coach and prospective client to do together. Experience—and often pain—set the stage for learning, and until that stage is reached, no amount of coaching will help a client significantly increase their capacity to lead.
