Coaching for the modern leader

Leaders face challenges

The conceptual journey from manager to leader has always been a tricky one to navigate. Picking up a new manager role is tough enough. Individuals who have performed well as an individual contributor are put under pressure to develop a new set of skills. Managers need to delegate, hold other people to account and deal with poor performance, ensure compliance with processes, and act as a first line of protection against risk.

This change of mindset can take years to embrace properly, and most find it extremely hard to escape from once they're there. Leaders - as opposed to managers - face entirely new challenges, because the roles demand something different from them. While the manager is responsible for ensuring the status quo, the leader has the opposite expectation on them. The leader is responsible for initiating change, through casting vision, and dealing with exceptions more than the norm.

A few years ago, this was more than enough. This second mindset change, asking the leader to make decisions under pressure in an environment characterised by contradictory and ambiguous information, proved too much for some. It wasn't uncommon to see a leader in an executive team locked into their old world, cautious about change, and too close to the detail.

The modern leader faces more challenges

It might only be true that the modern leader faces different challenges. I'm willing to have my mind changed on that. But it feels like there are more of them, and the new ones create a level of unique challenge that, quite simply, is too great for almost any human to bear.

The needs to let go of detail and initiate change haven't gone away, but the environment now makes those extremely difficult. Where historically change was a process in which an organisation moved from Point A to Point B, the modern world experiences constant change. Where historically the detail was an unhelpful distraction to a leader who struggled to drag their eyes away, the modern world offers an endless ocean of data and distractions. Not only that, much of it is unfamiliar, catnip to someone who desires to understand everything.

The pressure on leaders hasn't gone away either. Quite the opposite. Leaders are more visible now than ever before, and expectations are greater than ever before. The 2010s were a time in which many pointed in judgement at the 20th Century, suggesting that valuing leaders' personalities over their characters had created instability. Like a bow string snapping back, the 2020s seem to have combined the two, simultaneously needing leaders to be perfect role models across every aspect of life while also being a messianic figure for their organisation or cause.

In fact, an organisational leader without a cause seems suspicious in its own right, depending on the papers one reads. To not act is to act. A leader being interviewed by the press is in an impossible situation. If a question is asked that they don't have an ideal answer for in the moment, whatever response they give won't be enough. To say "no comment" is to make a comment. To reiterate an earlier point is to avoid the question. To ask for time to think, or to forget certain specific numbers relevant to the conversation in hand, is a sign of unacceptable weakness at best, and incompetence at worst.

Technology has brought us all closer together, so the sales pitches say. But every strength is a risk, when overplayed. The desirable ability to operate "always available" helpdesks across timezones, for example, brings with it unhealthy expectations and demands that were always impossible, but which now appear reasonable. And that interconnectedness puts even more pressure on leaders to make good decisions. The quality of a decision could affect the lives of employees, suppliers, and customers around the world, and could extend far beyond that as well.

A solution?

That weight of responsibility, for some, would be too much to bear under normal circumstances. But normal circumstances are abnormal in the modern world. There never feels like enough time, and the modern world has conditioned every leader to be incapable of protecting the few blocks of time that have been protected.

The solution, it turns out, has to be to slow down.

The simple act of slowing down in some cases might prove a leader’s saviour. Taking an extra few minutes to think an issue through properly could pay dividends - quite literally, in some cases. It can also offer a chance for leaders to fully experience what they’re going through, which can feel like a rare luxury at times. The experience of not knowing - a common one among leaders - feels tempting to flee from. But taking time to simply sit in that experience and truly feel it can be a helpful exercise.

Slowing down is also a remarkable tool to reveal to every leader an appeal to the greater callings we all have on us. Treating organisations as machines is a simple way to think rationally and save money on a spreadsheet, but leads to psychological safety being irreparably damaged. The financial cost of having to correct past mistakes can lead to net losses.

When a leader slows down, they think about those things. Slowing down gives permission to think about ethics, and legacy. The simple act of slowing down - perhaps most easily put into practice through a session of executive coaching - in itself can be a tool for systemic kindness.

I’ll repeat that statement in a simplified way, because it's been bouncing around my head for years:

Coaching should be an act of systemic kindness.

The need for leaders to slow down has always been the case. The idiom “more haste, less speed” has existed since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks. And, as we've seen, it's particularly important for us to pay attention to it at the present time.

Modern leaders are themselves in a constant state of profound change. They're grappling with their changing role, which is challenging enough. They're grappling with permanently changing technology, politics, society and economics, which is, for most observers, impossible. And they're grappling with the changing world of work, which brings with it a cornucopia of leadership challenges.

I'd like to suggest that coaches have a really important role to play in supporting modern leaders. Leaders need to feel compassion, and coaches can offer that. They also need someone to wrestle with; a clever coach raising an eyebrow and asking how the CEO will respond to that suggestion is a surprisingly effective way to improve it.

As the world becomes increasingly more volatile and the pace of change accelerates again, let's acknowledge that leaders have an important role to play, and that we can support them in making the future better for the next generation.