I rarely have guest posts on my blog, but today is a special day. My good friend Mike Figliuolo, co-author of Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results, has offered his insight on leadership for you all to enjoy! So without further ado, here’s Mike:
The pressure on leaders increases every day. Calls for “doing more with less,” echo through the halls. Ever-escalating expectations create a great deal of stress for leaders. The options for delivering on these heightened expectations are limited. Sure, leaders can step on the proverbial gas pedal and work harder and longer to create more “leadership capital,” but time, after all, is a non-renewable resource. Play those games too long and the stress adds up. The cumulative effects of these stressors can be devastating.
When leaders overwork themselves, their teams tend to do the same. People stay at the office until the boss leaves. Their stress levels are correlated with those of their boss. Eventually, team members get burned out. Some look for new jobs that will be less stressful. When they quit, they leave their leader shorthanded with an open role to fill. That vacancy increases the leader’s stress and puts an additional burden on the other team members to pick up the slack. The negative performance spiral picks up speed with no sign of slowing down. You may have gotten stressed out reading about this hypothetical situation. That’s because it’s all too real. This brute force approach to increasing leadership capital isn’t sustainable.
If you want to avoid the problems that come from overworking yourself and your team, the only viable option is being more efficient with how you spend your time and energy. How can you be smarter about how you’re investing your energy to get the best results you can at work while still having a life outside of it? The answer: do a better job understanding where you’re investing your leadership capital by assessing which of your team members are consuming the most of it then change your approach to leading them.
Mike Figliuolo is co-author of Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results and the author of One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership. He’s the managing director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC – a leadership development training firm. An Honor Graduate from West Point, he served in the U.S. Army as a combat arms officer. Before founding his own company, he was an assistant professor at Duke University, a consultant at McKinsey & Co., and an executive at Capital One and Scotts Miracle-Gro. He regularly writes about leadership on the thoughtLEADERS Blog.
Tags: Business Culture, Employee Engagement, Leader, Leadership, Team
