Leadership Development

One of the biggest challenges with making the transition to working from home is finding the way to separate work life from home life. When you work in an office, this is simple: work happens at the office, and home happens, well, at home. However, physically changing your work location to your house or apartment brings a new set of challenges and it can become hard to separate work and home.

Our experience as coaches has helped us more clearly define concepts like "executive presence" or "strategic perspective" for our clients and help them through their transitions to develop the skills and behaviors their senior leaders are looking for. While every situation is different, finding the balance between short-term delivery and longer term perspective is a theme that consistently seems to challenge a lot of leaders.

The number of productivity tools we have seen introduced in the last fifteen or 20 years is staggering. Things like email, instant messaging, online calendars, smartphones, scheduling software, and so on, all hold the promise of helping improve the way we manage our time. However, at the same time, we see professionals in all industries who are busier than ever and overcome with stress and the burden of too much to do and not enough time. The tools don’t seem to be working. Rather than helping us manage our time, as intended, it seems they have made it easier for us to become overwhelmed by the constant onslaught of information and requests for more time. The real problem isn’t the tools: It’s the behaviors we have adapted based on the misconception that these tools will somehow allow us to process more or manage more things simultaneously.

It happened several years ago during my meeting with one of my direct reports, Karen, on her last day of work. She had been the Director of Physician Relations at the hospital where we worked and she was moving out of the area as a result of her husband’s relocation. Her last words to me were “best boss ever.” Wow! How often do we as leaders get to hear something like that?!

Researchers estimate that the average professional spends over 60 hours each month in meetings and that over half of that time is wasted or unproductive. Recapturing some of this time would be a huge boon for many but doing so first requires us to reconsider why we have so many to begin with.

A senior level executive in a large company was overwhelmed with too much work, and needed to find a way to better manage her time. The one consistent development request from her team was that she needed to find a way to be more available. When she heard this request, she was completely distraught: She felt like she was available 24/7 and never had any time to herself. We had to find a way to make large scale change to how she worked with her team.

I recently read an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Do Your Employees Feel Respected?” and it reminded me of a seminar I attended several years ago when I was president of a hospital. The course was about creating and sustaining patient care excellence in hospitals and one of the faculty was Paul O’Neill, former CEO of Alcoa and Treasury Secretary of the United States. I found one of his topics particularly meaningful – respect.

One of my favorite leadership authors, Warren Bennis, once described the difference between managers and leaders with the expression “Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing.” Think about that for a moment. “Doing the right thing” means that rather than just perfecting all the things they currently do, leaders must have the ability to step back and question whether the things they are doing actually matter.

One of my father’s favorite expressions was that it’s not what you know, but who you know that matters. He typically pulled it out to refer to some type of perceived injustice involving nepotism or some other type of favor where the most qualified person wasn’t chosen for a position. While I don’t fully agree with him based on this interpretation, it is definitely true that who you know is pretty important for success as a leader.