Leaders Need Connection For Today And Tomorrow

Your connection with other leaders can be a bridge to innovation and authentic leadership.

Leaders need connection. The work of leading an organization or team and successfully implementing growth strategies for that organization or team, is not for the faint of heart. Regardless of your industry, leading can be very lonely work. For example, if you are managing a crisis that only you see coming, when and how to share it can be complicated: if you share too soon you can set off alarms that create fear, but if you share too late, your team may feel betrayed or blindsided by what they learn.

Let's face it, very few people are comfortable telling “the boss” that his or her strategy might not work. When your team is invested in doing good work and protecting the company’s reputation, leaders may not get the honest feedback they need to make the best decision. A connection with people who are supporting your success, and whose success you can cheer on, can provide a safe space where you become free to innovate through disruption.

The authentic relationships that you cultivate outside of your workplace, can be the sounding board that you need to process and strategize away from the echo chamber that can exist within an organization.

I'm pleased to have worked with an organization that creates this sense of safety and authenticity for women leaders. Five years ago, the world was in the middle of a pandemic. Meetings went online, but even virtually there was a real need for these decision makers to be together and to process challenges and events with others who were also leading in other organizations. The sense of safety and refuge in those groups allowed for leadership accountability, ‘think tanking’ around issues and concerns, and just a place to take off the cape and breathe through the turmoil.

Regain Your Sense of Direction. Register Today.

Now that we have gone back to business as usual, it appears that the authenticity and sense of camaraderie among leaders outside their organization has become less important. I wonder why? Have we become re-infatuated with the ways business happened before, and forgotten the important lessons of the COVID pandemic?  During that time of social and political unrest, we learned new ways of working and being together, whether virtually or outdoors.  We discovered that we could be productive while working at home and dealing with families and workplace teams. We figured it out “on the fly” and productivity, in many cases, was higher than before.

As we have returned to a sense of normalcy and begun to grapple with the challenges of today's world, I wonder if we have lost some of the lessons we learned during that time of crisis. How will your leadership impact the future of your organization and industry? Will you continue to use the authenticity, resilience and innovation that kept your organization stable during the pandemic? Do you still have your “North Star” in view? Or has that light of clarity once again been obscured by the same challenges that made it hard to find in the first place?

Michele Aikens is Lead Coach of Clear Sight Coaching & Consulting Inc.