This could encompass:
- Facing a promotion across divisions or an international relocation
- A new role with a skillset outside of your comfort zone
- Having to build larger new teams or train others to do so
- Engaging more senior stakeholders or forge partnerships with greater consequences
- Breaking down silos and bring people together to cooperate
- Recognising culture and leveraging it
- Tactically boosting your visibility and developing platfor
- Seeking opportunities to be read, seen or heard
- Fine-tuning your personal brand
- Acclimatizing across radically contrasting business cultures
Leadership transition can always use some support.
For some, confidence and impact can be optimised through linguistic and voice development. Vocal modulation is elemental to gravitas. Vocal projection is less so, but still useful. For others, anxiety or tension are addressed through applying techniques using CBT principles in realising and responding to what your beliefs throw up.
And for others still, mastering the art of handling complexity off-script is what restores the leader mojo. Improv skills and practical techniques to manage intricate ideas flowing from our minds when we’re in the spotlight have served many leaders well.
Managing expectations is critical in these stages. Those you encounter will always have their first impressions. And expectations. These are powerful and need to be managed, so you need to:
- Apply situational analysis that is impartial, top-down and reflective
- Seek out and select particular types of relationships and nurture these
- Recognise how this helps networks form, and therefore your strategic platform
- Which of your attributes do you use too much? Sometimes the very skills that secured your career move are the very ones now holding you back.
- (Sometimes the very skills that secured your career move are the very ones now holding you back.)
- What ball-and-chain habits do you feel cannot be changed: granularity? micro-managing?
- Which compounded beliefs are problematic:
- Your secret autobiographical lens as a martyr? Or as the unconsulted expert?
- Your over-committing as the fixer and ending up as the fire-fighter?
- Being stuck to the tried-and-tested, unable to creatively spread your wings?
- As an intellect, do you persuade merely by logic alone?
- Are you at risk of burnout from overwhelm and fatigue?
- Do you have importer syndrome, self-doubt or defensive beliefs that self-perpetuate?
Below the tip of the iceberg: culture.
Fitting into new business cultures looks easy on paper – the raw reality hits home after a career transition. It’s much more seismic and unsettling than almost everyone expects.
With so much blogged on organisational culture, it is easy to take it for granted, forgetting that a career transition across industries and organisation types can be deeply upsetting. We often find ourselves making negative stereotypical judgements when we don’t take the time and space to see culture and context from a bird’s eye view:
- Exploring recognised frameworks to grasp the actual differences at a base level
- Applying these step by step to your workplace context,
- Rendering you wiser and more resilient in operating across functions, divisions, organisations, industries or regions.
Taking it further, diversity and cross-cultural perspective can enrich your operations and be used to your advantage. Understanding models like the Margerison McCann wheel, and the principles of neurodiversity providing fundamental advantage in teams, sheds light on the potential for benefit to you, as you embrace and leverage diversity and culture.
Part of this coaching is:
- Unpacking and pinpointing the self-identifying ‘scripts’ of others
- Distinguishing the tip of the iceberg from that below the surface driving its momentum
- How and whom people identify with
- How they diversely perceive time, privilege, power, rules and control
- Team building to leverage diversity
- Planning for building fluid matrix or globally dispersed teams
In fact, leaders often bring harm to their businesses when hiring on the once-trendy idea of ‘cultural fit’ alone, as the bottom-line in recruiting talent. Hiring personalities like yourself can be fatal. Team members with opposite working styles make for richer output. Millions of years of evolution have given us diverse personalities and neuro-diversity, bringing great benefit to our survival as groups. As a new leader, your effective teams will be best planned around delegation playing to very diverse strengths.
Conflict resolution:
Wherever humans interact, there is conflict. It is a fundamental leadership competency in businesses of any sort. And it starts with recognising that conflict is often constructive and healthy for innovation. We can:
- Develop the art of active listening one-to-one
- Become aware of the power of acknowledgement and saving face
- Explore problem definition, red-lines and contingencies
- Learn about the power of envisaging common futures
- Reflect on nurturing your own your internal courage
I have had the great privilege of unblocking and enriching the communication performance of many accomplished and aspiring individuals facing or following leadership transition. And it feels so good.
"Tony is a professional, extremely knowledgeable, articulate and approachable. He provided me superb guidance and direction in public speaking and helped me rediscover an inner confidence and self belief that I thought I had lost."
"Inspiring - Tony has patiently guided me along a path to career enlightenment. Enabling me to achieve clarity and define a vision for my future. He has set mechallenges which ultimately helped me understand my core drivers and the value I can add."
"Tony's guidance as a speech and presentation coach were transformative for me. He helped me understand my motivations and inhibitions. At the start he told me his goal was to make himself redundant as fast as possible. He helped overcome the blockages with impressive speed and insight. I have already recommended Tony to several colleagues."
“After years working for the same company, I was unsure how to present myself to market, but Tony guidance was instrumental to a smooth transition.”
