Leadership Development: Action is Not Always First
In our Total Leadership Connections Program the initial thrust concerns the need to know rather than the need to do. It requires a bit of containment in the “action coaching” department. So many join in the first session with that “tell me what to do” look in their eyes.
That bit of restlessness is a good thing. It takes some centering, some contemplation till the “aha’ moments about what to do really happen. While we will offer many ideas about the essence of leadership, each of us must peel away the excess baggage we have been carrying, often without even being aware of it.
On the lists of Amazon leadership books there are so many that offer this model or that model, this diagram or that, and you get to pick and choose. Not so with TLC; here you begin to look at how you handle conflict, challenges, the times when you can’t get anyone to really understand what you want done, the times when the office politics starts to heat to boiling and you just want the damn work to get done.
When you begin to see the behavior patterns that were learned well before you took your fist school test, there is a light that goes on. That is when the chatter stops about why we are studying ourselves and the way we relate to others. You here the “oh, now I get it” sigh of relief all around the room.
Once the thinking broadens to the intergenerational realm more light bulbs pop on. We don’t design the legacies of our lives, we inherit them. You begin to see more than just the fact you got your blue eyes from you father’s side of the family, or going bald by forty, well that is a pattern in the family.
You realize that your need to avoid is just what your parents did; maybe still do, when conversations become tough. You start to realize that your competition with your older brother is just like the competition that your mother had with her sister, and by God, that her mother had with her brother.
Then you leave for the months in-between to practice the way OUT of the old patterns. First you OBSERVE, yup, that’s all you have to do. Then you begin to UNDERSTND and the hold the patterns have on you becomes less intense. That’s it. OBSERVE, and then UNDERSTAND. Next time you will learn the ways to TRANSFORM the patterns.
By the end of the program you are a much sought after leader, often a promotion shows up without you even having to make a pitch for it. And the synchronicities start and that’s really fun.
Someone calls you have not heard from in a long time and had the perfect solution to a problem you’ve been mulling over; stuff like that.
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