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EFFECTIVE
LEADERSHIP
What Drives
Your Style?
SO, YOU WOULD LIKE TO INCREASE YOUR PROFITS OR YOUR BUSINESS IS
NOT MEETING TARGETS? HOW DO YOU LEAD YOUR ORGANIZATION TO
ACHIEVE THESE RESULTS? WHAT MAKES A STRONG LEADER AND HOW
IMPORTANT IS LEADERSHIP ANYWAY WHEN IT COMES TO PROFITABILITY?
B
eing a personal development coach, my area of expertise is
people and working with the people managers, the leaders is my passion.
Leadership style and the accompanying leadership "Blind Spots"
begin deep inside a person's core motivation. Bottom-line profits
directly reflect the fundamental internal position of every leader.
Leadership motivation is a core driver of bottom-line profitability.
Hidden Drivers
Take for example, the now famous case of Hewlett Packard's recent
ex-boss Carly Fiorina. Emerging from a corporate sales background
she had charisma, passion and fortitude. She liked to be seen and
used her leadership position as a salesperson would - milking the lime88
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light to drive market awareness. She did most things right, except for
one fundamental, she was out of touch with her own organization.
Let's also take a quick look at her core motivation; Carly was
someone who needed to be acknowledged by her peers. This resulted from a life background where she measured her personal selfworth by other's perception of her. In other words, her fundamental
unconscious motivation was and still is, external acknowledgement.
A dangerous and unfortunately, a common driver in most of us.
The danger point of such a driver is that one's 'core motivation'
totally relies on external positive feedback, for example sales figures,
the confidence of the board of directors, one's peer group of leadership colleagues. The problem here is this, no matter how much
back slapping one receives, external brownie points, one cannot
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undo an entire childhood of family-based subliminal negative feedback.
The internal program of hidden drivers is set well back in our early past.
This key area is where all leaders need to do their 'due diligence',
so that their core motivation is genuinely effective and not sabotaging
their company's endeavours.
Identifying and re-adjusting the deep unconscious anchors of selfdoubt from early childhood takes a leader from being effective in the
short-term, to being a long-term stable visionary.
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Leadership Blindspots
Let's look again at Carly's leadership style. Carly had tons of promise
and vision, yet a fundamental omission was glaringly obvious to all
who worked alongside her. Her omission? Her people!
Blindspots such as these are unfortunately a common legacy of
leadership where one's core motivation has not been examined.
Experience, strategy skills, broad shoulders and unerring instinct are
a pre-requisite for business leadership. Yet how can such an obvious
gap have occurred within the leadership style of someone with so
much going for them?
Gaps in perception are a common result where unconscious motivation is being driven by self-doubt. Whether we are aware of it or
not, we do run our lives according to unconscious emotional needs.
These emotional requirements stem from childhood gaps in emotional
nourishment. Unfortunately, on our own we cannot easily identify them,
they are part of our thinking style.
If shareholder interests and company profitability can so easily rest
on the emotional needs of a business leader, it is amazing that so few
such leaders bother to examine their unconscious drivers which create
astonishingly obvious blind-spots.
Let's do a quick tour of ways the unconscious sabotages leadership:
1. If one's parents were strongly externally goal driven and gave you
messages of approval only after you achieved similar goals, your
self-esteem would rely on external goal results.
a. This would result in an intense need for external approval, which
would create an over-emphasis on approval from colleagues, director boards, etc.
b. A resulting blindspot would be fear of disapproval. Spending too
much time in the top end of your organization, possibly ignoring
those whose approval you don't need.
c. Needless to say this could create a credibility gap in your own
organization, people not aligning with your vision, lowered morale
and productivity. Due to misreading you as a leader though lack of
contact and transparency.
2. If you spent your childhood being praised by your parents for looking good, saying the right things, staying calm, unemotional and
playing it by the book, you would run your organization as though
they were a family needing approval.
a. This would result in covert (no obvious) manipulation by staff members to
gain your approval. In other words, mind games to score brownie points.
b. A resulting blindspot for you as leader would be possibly not appreciating the true worth of your staff. The hidden intensity of your unconscious
drive to mimic your parent's style could take up your attention and divert
your focus from clear results. A chronic atmosphere of two-way emotional manipulation drains precious energy, morale and bottom-line profits.
c. If you wonder why your staff play emotional games with you, check
your own background of emotional disconnection.
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S PA A U S T R A L A S I A
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3. If your childhood was spent alone, dreaming of greener pastures,
wondering how the rest of the world worked and your parents were
not around much of the time, you might find that your staff don't get
clear enough direction.
a. Due to your lack of role modeling and the self-made person experience, you might find your staff are left to fill in the knowledge gaps
in their area of responsibility. This would result from your subliminal
core belief that role modeling and direction are 'unnecessary'.
b. A blindspot here would possibly be not directing your staff enough,
presuming they understand when they do not and not sending clear
messages down the responsibility line.
c. A result would be self-doubt in people with key responsibility areas
due to your lack of communicating your passion and vision.
Confusion and misunderstandings would also be common creating
dysfunctional teams and friction amongst key staff. (All due to presumptions, due to lack of clear direction.)
The list of blindspots is long, as is the list of parenting styles and our
perception of them during childhood.
Who would have thought that our parents had such a long reach
into our lives? Yet the logic behind this is easy to understand. Our entire
database of experiences started with deep subliminal imprints from our
earliest years. It was these years that 'set', like concrete, our opinions
and our points of view. Certainly, later adult years modified these
ground bases, yet modification is not enough. The profound construction of everything we believe began from our first infant experiences.
The earlier an impact moment occurred to shape an attitude, the
stronger our reaction and therefore our set belief point.
Leadership style is thus the result of the leader's past history. And motivation comes directly from this history, the motivation to lead, to inspire,
to achieve, to provide sustenance to staff, shareholders and community.
A short facilitation with an experienced personal development mentor
gives immediate insights into leadership motivation, both subliminal as
well as aboveground deliberate. As an introduction to this kind of facilitation I would like to offer below a short exercise to support your selfawareness as a leader. These suggestions will lead you through an exploration of your hidden drivers, as well as your rational style of leadership.
It is important to remember one fundamental when exploring these
'drivers'; we are the result of our parents' and social conditioning. Our
decisions are largely driven by lower emotional needs, for instance the
need to bridge a lack of early emotional nurturing. This is the key
understanding in all self-examination. Once this early territory is
mapped, one's style can be changed to meet your self-caring needs as
well as to identify and attend to the, until-now, unconscious blindspots.
Exploration of your Blind Spots
and Hidden Motivations
The technology here is simple yet powerful. By spending time reflecting
and identifying one's internal attitudes - then writing them down - your
unconscious unlocks the childhood memory associated with the attitude.
Conscious Identification begins a clearing of unconscious reflexes.
Additionally, reading the words you are writing anchors into the subliminal that you have made the attitudinal change, locking in that perception.
Let's begin with an exploration of core beliefs:
1. Identify on paper your fears of failure.
a. Describe in detail what worst case scenarios may look like - home
life, business, career, and life direction.
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b. Associated with each one write down your deepest "what if" emotional response. Emotional honesty is paramount here.
c. Write down your history of failure (again, be ruthlessly honest).
d. Associated with each of these write down your deepest emotional
responses to these failures.
2. Identify on paper your hopes and dreams.
a. Describe your highest possible ideals in home life, business, career,
life direction and contribution.
b. Identify the associated emotional reaction you would have if these
took place.
c. Write down areas in your life you have already achieved your ideal.
d. Identify carefully and honestly exactly what emotional reactions you
have to these achievements.
(It is important in these exercises to identify emotions. With each
item, put thinking on pause - then notice what emotion occurs spontaneously. This is the key 'shift' moment.)
New Attitudes
It is after such an exploration that you can press the 'refresh' button and
begin re-investigating and re-introducing new attitudes. Until an identification process such as the one above is completed, the old frameworks will
stay hidden, overgrown and dusty and will unconsciously control you.
Leadership to Propel and Win
Let's explore another aspect of leadership motivation.
Beneath the surface of most leadership, as we have learned, there
are subliminal 'drivers' subverting optimal team performance, subverting indeed, company bottom lines.
Rather than subvert, let us now examine how leadership motivation can
propel and win the game of team productivity and shareholder confidence.
Team Dynamics
When a business leader's style sparks negative resistance due to an unconscious personal dynamic, the team they lead has predictable reactions.
Robert Heller, one of the world's best-selling authors on business management, quotes Bill Gates as having a coercive leadership style. "The software czar has kept his fingers in every pie and has ruled the actions of his
delegates by constant and fierce interrogations, which have often reversed
their decisions," he writes in a recent article on Management Styles.
Bill Gates' vision to control global software usage to the maximum
market share has its downside, enemies are created and one might
even say he has become tired of control. Gates' childhood had its ups
and downs as with us all. Yet there is a difference here, a clear difference of determination, clarity and strategic decision-making.
What kind of core motivation does it take to own the world's largest
software giant? Where does that kind of spin doctoring and vision
evolve from?
From reading about his life, Bill Gates emerged from a childhood
of subtle criticism, covert (unconscious) control by his parents, in particular by his father. These early triggers are now sounding familiar to
us, yet the difference to his success lies in Gates' genuine decision to
"make a difference". This may not seem obvious to outsiders, but Bill
Gates began with a vast empowering vision, to provide the person in
the street with easy gate-ways into computer-dom.
Lacking sophisticated programming skills, the general public prefer, to
this day, to enter the dim intricate world of MS-DOS via 'Windows'.
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EFFECTIVE
LEADERSHIP
What Drives Your
Leadership Style?
Personal Mentoring Program
These are windows into an enlightened world of immense possibilities, graphically and mathematically, using communication frameworks even a toddler can follow. The dream for every person to have a computer on their desk is well on its way.
It has been an exhausting vision for Gates and the strain is showing. He no longer obsessively
controls a myriad divisions breathing down the neck of each of his managers. He has been removed
from day-to-day management and his company has been restructured. His leadership style of "his way
or the highway" created decision-making bottlenecks and according to Heller "dozens of Microsoft's
most capable leaders, all around 40, have opted out." Coercive control of his employed creative
minds has set a clock ticking that can undo a mountain of momentum. We can but wait and watch.
Vision Clarity
With Human Potential Expert
Alicia Power
Examine & Up-Skill
Your Style!
• Evolve from short-term
effective to long-term visionary
• Identify gaps in perception
• Examine unconscious drivers
• Identify & re-adjust self-doubt
• Connect with a motivation that
drives your profits exponentially
Call 0418 970 335
(+61 418 970 335)
Seminar
PROFITABLE TEAMS
Is your team passionately
behind you??
Phone: 0418 970 335
enquiries@espbusinesssolutions.com
www.espbusinesssolutions.com
Yet vision to change the world is a serious motivator and there is no doubt this has driven Gates'
success. As a Spa-industry business leader I encourage you to ignite a genuine passion so that
your staff can feel your enthusiasm, your dream. Dare you, as a business leader, dream?
What if I said your dream propels your entire business? Sure you have unconscious drivers
that colour your leadership style, but behind even these lies something even more voracious,
even more compelling. A higher motive, a motive broader than your personal agenda. It is this
breadth that inspires nations, inspires your team to excel beyond expectations.
Gates' vision worked. Certainly he caught the slipstream of the global monopoly on his software, yet I venture to say that each person working for him also shared his vision, to provide
people easy access to a truly amazing array of leveraged computer power.
What is your dream? What is your personal vision for your business? Take away the dollar
rewards and find something beyond the bottom-line. Strange as it sounds, this fresh approach
will drive your profits exponentially. Taking your vision and watching yourself score a higher
goal than mere budget targets inspires enthusiasm, enthusiasm from a place beyond financial
needs. Humans need encouragement and they need to feel inspired. Helping other people is
a deep natural inspiration that doesn't fail to ignite passion.
The Spa and hospitality industry is founded on the premise of service. Right there you have one
of the deepest core motivators in the human psyche, to help others. It delivers profound emotional
rewards that mirror those found in parent/child nurturing. As a business leader you may find, after
some reflection that you are in 'the' industry where this emotional reward drives most of your staff.
Unconscious motivations drive us all. We cannot escape from our upbringing nor our deepest craving to contribute. It is in business that both these drivers reveal their power, both to subvert and to take a business to extraordinary heights.
Eliminate The Guesswork
Being made aware of what propels us in certain directions takes the guesswork out of the "why"
factor, why is my business not working optimally? Why do people give unconditionally to customers who need nurturing? What moves and inspires us to exceed expectations? What is the
magic ingredient that motivates your staff to care?
I believe it is time business leaders did a re-think on below-the-surface motivators and took
them seriously. Indeed used them to their advantage. I will leave you with a final thought:
Doing the best you can is NOT enough. Finding out what sabotage patterns run your thinking
takes courage and deliberate attention. If you continue to run your business under the motives driven from unfinished childhood business, you run the risk of serious blindspots in your leadership style.
I encourage you as a leader to lift your leadership to its highest potential. Take the risk, see what
lies under the carpet and step into a domain of inner balance, lower stress and higher lifetime
C
rewards. You owe it to yourself, you owe it to your staff and to your business' bottom-line.
By Alicia Power
Alicia Power is a leadership coach and founder of ESP Business Solutions - a
unique service that provides speedy identification of unconscious motivations
and subsequent mentoring. Check www.espbusinesssolutions.com or call
0418 970 335 (+61418 970 335) for more information. Recommended
link: www.thinkingmanagers.com De Bono and Heller articles on leadership.