How Leaders Can Invest In Themselves As Instruments Of Change
This post was originally published in Forbes Magazine on October 11, 2019. You can read the post on Forbes website here. Laura Maloney is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council.
As a leadership coach for purpose-driven people and organizations, I spend a lot of time working with clients who are striving to influence big societal outcomes. Their work is intense and their schedules can be brutal. Often, leaders in social and humanitarian sectors are so highly focused on maximizing the talents of their team and effecting positive change in the world that they have little time and energy left for their own personal development.
This isn’t because continued personal development isn’t important for leaders. A great deal of for-profit organizations are investing in leadership development, which is now a $366 billion global industry. However, in the nonprofit space, most funding is allocated to programmatic outcomes – even though programmatic growth is directly influenced by the personal growth of those within it. This is why leadership development is so highly prioritized by learning organizations; recent statistics show that 94% of learning organizations plan to maintain or increase their leadership development budget.
As noted in the Harvard Business Review, there is a “symbiotic learning relationship between an employee and an organization.” Put simply, high-growth leaders drive organizational growth, but they require reciprocal interest and support from their organizations. This investment in personal growth must be gradual and consistent. Unfortunately, people aren’t able to simply push a button and “upgrade” themselves like their iPhones. Perhaps a better analogy for personal development is continuously calibrating oneself as an instrument, in order to play a range of notes in the right tune.
If we’re going to solve or even mitigate today’s complex environmental and humanitarian problems, we have to be able to meet complexity from an elevated place within. To quote Albert Einstein, “The solutions to our current problems cannot be solved from the level of consciousness that created them.” It is only with an investment in our own development that we can begin to see approaches that may have previously been invisible, due to the lens with which we viewed problems at the time.
Charitable organizations, especially, have an obligation to invest in their employees – whether that’s through executive coaching, leadership development or continuing education – because their employees will be able to achieve their organizations’ goals much faster, more efficiently and with less noise. Investing in the growth of our people is an organizational imperative.
We can take a cue from supreme athletes who invest in their bodies, minds and hearts in order to be in peak condition as they hit the field to do what they love most. Similarly, leadership development takes initiative from leaders themselves. To make room in your life for deeper personal work, here are a few steps to help pave the way.
Take (back) your time.
Undertaking personal development when you have limited resources means you must take inventory of how you spend those resources. Start by uncovering where you can find time for personal development by doing a time audit. The cumulative impact of small tasks adds up, and it can be a bit shocking to find you’ve spent three hours of your work day on just emails and office drop-ins. Reducing or eliminating unnecessary time-consuming activities by using tools such as an Action Priority Matrix can help leaders cut mental clutter and better-align their time to achieve their vision.
Identify competing commitments.
Many leaders may enthusiastically commit to developing new skill sets or breaking old habits, but they bump up against hidden, competing commitments that act as indiscernible stumbling blocks. For example, an executive might hesitate to delegate the work they’re currently doing because they worry others won’t be able to do it as well. This perfectionistic tendency can easily hold a person back from achieving their bigger goal. The leader’s obscured attachment to being seen as the subject matter “expert” may keep her tethered to the very behavior she is seeking to change.
Awareness of our competing commitments allows us to start looking for assumptions we make that anchor and inform our specific hidden commitments, then notice how these assumptions lead to the behaviors that are undermining instead of supporting our longer-term goals. As we mature in our leadership, we are more willing to experiment with giving up some control and become more comfortable with not knowing everything, which then allows us to embrace a larger version of ourselves over time. We learn to sit with discomfort.
Adopt a growth mindset.
An important stage in someone’s development is learning how to stand back and observe themselves objectively – with curiosity instead of judgment. For those of us who have devoted our lives to a cause, it can be difficult to detach our identity from the work. But we are more than our jobs, even though this can be hard to see at times. Being able to see ourselves – and how we show up – from a balcony view gives us an ability to see different aspects of ourselves, which, in turn, allows us to see more choices, potential approaches and solutions with less internal churn over time.
As you continue to mature in your leadership, your core identity – what makes you uniquely you – remains unchanged, but you do have greater capacity to meet the world head-on without it knocking you to the ground. Rather than fixating on skills we may be missing, adopting a growth mindset helps us focus on what’s possible and endure the learning curves that come with self-development. The key to conscious leadership is being open, curious and committed to learning, versus being closed, defensive and committed to being right.
Diversify your knowledge.
Personal development initiatives are infinite and may not appear to align perfectly with your current industry or expertise. For example, an expert who was promoted to a manager’s position because of her subject matter expertise suddenly finds herself managing finances. She never intended to go to business school, as her true passion lies elsewhere, but the training may help her see problems from a new frame of reference. She emerges with a new suite of skills and a fresh perspective on how she might approach systemic challenges facing the cause she so dearly loves.
Often, the most important humanitarian breakthroughs stem from applying seemingly unrelated knowledge or technologies to solve complex problems. One of the most compelling recent examples of this phenomenon is Microsoft’s AI for Earth initiative, which uses cloud and AI tools to protect endangered animals like snow leopards and elephants. Saving people, animals and the entire planet demands that we develop our internal capacity to drive change and harness our collective talents to address societal challenges from unlikely places. And this begins with leadership.