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Improving leadership performance often focuses on improving capabilities and behaviours.  This may range from impacting areas of interpersonal capability right through to technical areas such as the leader’s ability to read a balance sheet.

Typically when leaders are ready to take a significant step shift with their leadership, impacting behaviour will not be sustained if it occurs in isolation.  In order to get a significant step shift, and to sustain that shift, it is likely that the thinking and emotions that underpin behaviour need to be impacted.  As this occurs the improvements can be dramatic.

We all have beliefs and related emotions and where our behaviour is delivering the results we want, and not creating undue stress, we are quite happy to retain these.  Where our behaviour is compromised it is likely that we have limiting beliefs or conflicting emotions. Developing new behaviours and skills will often be required and often the breakthroughs will come from uncovering and shifting or learning ways to manage the related limiting beliefs and emotions.

Take a simple example where a leader is ready to develop new interpersonal skills around understanding what drives their people and how to tap into those individual motivators. If the leader believes all people should motivate themselves or if they feel overly nervous about asking searching questions of their people , then impacting that thinking and having them feel more comfortable are key to ensuring any new skills they develop will be utilised and therefore make a difference.

Performance = Capability – Interference 

The interference is what primarily occurs internally at a mental and emotional level and this interference can often be reduced quite quickly allowing you to perform at the level of your capability. Becoming aware of your interference and your ability to manage yourself is key to reducing interference.

Whatever you are doing to take your leadership to a new level, check your development is occurring at a mental and emotional level, and not just at a behavioural or skills level.

How CEOs can achieve the best results for themselves and their organisation

You aspired to be top dog in the organisation, you have achieved that success and yet somehow you do not feel…. well, successful.  Irrespective of whether you have a great quarter or a mediocre one, there’s something missing…. your mojo is not there like it was and you want it back.

When you have some space, which is not very often, and you reflect on yourself and your role, you know there is a significant gap between who you are, and who you are being as CEO.  You are not always being true to yourself, to your values, your principles and your beliefs.  Bridging that gap is critical on two levels:

1. To ensure your leadership is credible and effective enough to deliver significant results.
2. To provide you with the fulfilment, health and wellbeing required to sustain your leadership.

I know what it’s like to be running a successful business and yet to wake up feeling totally unfulfilled.  To know the stress and anxiety was less to do with business situations and more to do with the lack of honesty between who I was and how I was operating.  To know that the holiday I am hanging out for is going to provide a short term reprieve rather than a long term fix.

There is no one leadership model for all leaders, irrespective of the business and the phase that business is in.  Leadership must be tailored and central to that tailoring is you, the CEO.  True and sustainable leadership. leadership that inspires you and those around you, can only occur from the inside out.

More often leadership development is thought of as being outside in.  We need to build new capability in order to achieve certain objectives.  The more powerful approach is to uncover and realise more fully the capability that is already there.  Being an authentic leader requires you to be more of who you are, and to empower those around you to do the same.

Leaders who continually strive for personal mastery are essential to business growth and to our wider business community.  Each significant step in this journey begins with renewed or updated self awareness so that strengths can be leveraged and weaknesses or preferences can be covered or balanced.  Knowing yourself provides the platform to know your team and when this is combined with your business strategy you have created the best environment for delivering both strong business results and recapturing your mojo.

Leaders’ performance can be improved and enhanced by effective leadership coaching.

Leadership coaching is about supporting and facilitating leaders to clarify what he or she wants to achieve and to identify and work on the key underlying areas that will enable that leader’s success.  These underlying areas vary from leader to leader. 

For example, in some cases increased levels of self confidence will enable a leader to operate significantly more effectively.  In other cases, the development of skills to manage stress or conflict make the most difference to leadership performance.

Leadership performance is enhanced in many ways through a leadership coaching programme. Outcomes from a programme can include:

• The leader develops an increased level of self awareness of how he or she is as a as a leader.  As a result of the gap analysis phase and the facilitation by an executive coach who is objective and comfortable to challenge the coachee, the leader develops a clear understanding of leadership strengths and gaps (including behavioural gaps) and an increased ability to manage the gaps.
• The executive sets a clear vision of where they want to be, how they  will achieve that and setting clear objectives and success measures to work with.
• As executive coaching offers the leader the opportunity to step back from the detail and see big picture, leaders develop enhanced ability to think more broadly and strategically about what will enable their success and that of their leadership team and the business in the medium to long term.

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Find out more about Blue Chip Coaching’s leadership development coaching.

If motivation levels are flagging, despite your career success, you may need to examine some key questions.

Key Values and Priorities

When you as a leader are clear on your work values, you have a foundation for leadership that will allow you, your team and your organisation to benefit. Are you clear on your values and their priority? 

Take a little time to ask yourself the following:

• What is most important to me about my work, my career… what else… what else?
• How satisfied am I that these values are being met in my current role?

What to Consider

The values you uncover are key to your motivation and energy. Your work values will be unique and where these are satisfied in your role you will find yourself getting out of bed midweek with a spring in your step. High workloads and even high pressure will be manageable with little personal cost because your leadership and work is consistent with who you are. Where your values are not being met then this will often lead to high levels of stress and mean that your performance is compromised or not sustainable. Uncovering your values is interesting, finding ways to ensure you can deliver against these values in your leadership is essential for you as a person, for the team you lead and the organisation you work for.

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View more life and work coaching tips from Blue Chip Coaching.