How to Inspire your Senior Leadership Team to take Action in Alignment with Your Vision

After a point, getting your direct team to take action in alignment with your vision and in partnership with each other becomes the biggest bottleneck for business growth. One CEO I was talking to yesterday lamented how he had been driving home the point to his team during every Monday morning meeting on tough action to be taken and all he had received for the last few months is a yes from few who never took action and silent shuffling of feet from the rest.

Another CEO felt his team never kept pace with the massive amount of creative ideas for business growth that he was generating. Yet, another CEO experienced a silent mutiny from his most powerful direct report because the CEO had been hired from outside, ignoring the CFO's ambitions to sit in the corner office. Another client shared how he felt his team just wasn't scaling up with action and there was a lot to ask for as far as velocity to respond to market situations and customer demand was concerned.

I am usually approached to transform the senior leadership team to become more agile, more open to new ideas, more quick to implement, more coachable, more receptive to feedback, more open to learning, have greater leadership depth, be more collaborative and more of a lot many other things to support business growth. It always turns out that I end up coaching the CEO to become more agile, more open to new ideas, more quick to implement, more coachable, more receptive to feedback, more open to learning, have greater leadership depth, be more collaborative and more of a lot many other things for business to grow.

Here are few ideas to help you transform your direct team to become powerful allies for each other and for you that together you lead your business from good to great for deeply fulfilling, joyous, sustainable success:

1. Your team and your organisation is your mirror. If you find something missing out there, it would support you to look in the mirror for the source of that. Start there.

2. The only way to inspire others to support you to realise your dreams is to really understand what their dreams are and be committed to support them to realise theirs, even if it seems on the surface to be conflicting with yours.

​3. Drop your masks and armours so that they can drop theirs. A great team is built when members can connect to each other with authenticity and vulnerability.

4. Do much more than what you ask them to do. That is what leadership is and you are their leader.

5. Trust them so that they can trust you.

6. You may not be their coach, but you are their Team Captain. Be aware of your emotions and your limiting thoughts and judgements at the source of your low energy emotions because they reduce the energy of the team and their belief in their own self. Loss of self-belief results in loss of productivity, creativity and effectiveness.

Learn to communicate like a coach, learn to believe in your team like a coach and learn to be tough like a coach. 

7. Throw a process at the problem, not people. Develop Process Thinking, Design Thinking and First Principles Thinking. Use 5-Whys to identify the root cause and 5-Hows for creative solutions. 

8. Live your values, mission and vision instead of talking about it. Non-verbal communication has greater impact than the words you use.

9. Become coachable so that they become coachable. Being coachable means having the ability to look inside for the mess outside.

10. Give self-care the highest importance. Then only will you be authentically be able to care for others.

11.  Be compassionate love and kindness so that they become compassionate love and kindness. This is the secret sauce of a company on the way to greatness.

12. Make personal mastery your mantra and grow physically, energetically, emotionally, mentally / intellectually and spiritually; so that your team and subsequently your organisation lives from mastery and excellence consciousness, making a dent in the Universe.

13. Lead with questions so that your team generates ideas and solutions, not you.

14. Constantly learn, unlearn and relearn so that your Leadership Team members are eternal students and create a learning organisation.

15. Have the agility of mind to wrap your head 360 degree around any reality to have the ability to see the truth from every point of view, however contradictory. Stay sourced in that all point of views are valid so that your team bring in understanding and reverence for their peers' views to collaborate with each other for business growth instead of running to you to solve their conflicts.

16. Learn to communicate in the world of others by using silence as your gift. Communication is 90% listening and 10% talking. In that 10%, only asking questions to allow for more listening to happen.

17. Be the world of integrity. What you say, you do at the time you said you would do it, the way you said you would do it; however much it hurts you, irrespective of to whom you may have given your word. Be like this and your team will never say yes and not do it.

18. Let humility and gratefulness be your essence that it powers others in your space to become stars; to have the strength and courage to remove the dark curtain of ignorance between them and their light.

19. Be the least interesting person in the room to give space to others to become leaders. Choose being interested instead of being interesting. Your leadership success will come from creating more leaders, not more followers because more leaders drives your business up and more followers only leads your business to a certain death in a future not so far away. Choose compassionate love and reverence over charisma, all the time. 

20. Have the vision that brings tears to your eyes. Have a vision to make a dent in the Universe to give your team the invigorating, refreshing, exhilarating, rejuvenating energy of a crusade, of a revolution, of transformation, of building cathedrals overs cutting stones. Have a vision that has the power of giving you the purpose of your life so that it gives your team the purpose of their life.

21. Have relationship of equals. Have the same reverence for your office boy as for your biggest client. This is the energy you need to grow leaders.

22. Know you are here to be of service - to your direct team, to your employees, to your customers, to your family, to your community, to your country and ultimately to humanity. Being settled in this will centre you; with nowhere to go and nothing to prove. That will unleash productivity, performance, effectiveness, creativity, innovation at levels you have never experienced before in yourself and in your team.

The above is a journey. Don't make yourself wrong if you are not there already. Neither brush off the above cynically, and view it as unreal and impractical. Be committed to learn to get there.

Keep making a difference. There is a reason why you are born, there's a reason why you are in the position that you are in. It is to come home to yourself through the work you do.

Love,
Jyoti.