Heart and Humility
Our world is in constant motion. The markets, our businesses, our employees and ourselves are in flux – growing, shifting, developing right under our noses, ready or not. And when running a growing company, or getting a new enterprise off the ground, or shifting into a new leadership role we can find ourselves slipping into a seemingly ever-present swirl of fluidity.
When I was first hired in as a CEO, we had eighty employees in the company. A few years later, riding a wave of fast growth, we hired and onboarded eighty new employees in less than twelve months’ time. There was a tremendous amount of change that came with this growth. It stretched the company, the management team, and me as a leader.
On one hand we want our businesses to gain traction and expand and we’re eager for the opportunities this presents. At the same time, in the midst of all this change, when we take a moment to pause and look up we can unexpectedly find the terrain has completely shifted. People, practices, skills, and talents once relied on may no longer be supportive and may even be getting in the way. This can be unsettling and disorienting and feel like you and your team are losing your footing.
I find for myself and other leaders I work with that there can be a tendency to avoid the practice of pausing and looking up when so much is pressing for our attention. In the race to an arbitrary finish line we’ve marked in our minds we keep our heads down and keep going as if on a high paced obstacle course.
This head-down energy is often fueled by fear. Fear if you slow down, you’ll never regain your momentum. Fear you and your team don’t have the skills to make it through this leg of the race. Fear that you’ve attached your identity to completing a course that you may not even want to be running anymore.
The risk in not pausing is that we lose awareness of the terrain shifts around and within us. This may cause us to try to run when we should be swimming. To power clumsily past obstacles when our skills are lacking. Or, in navigating a particular hurdle we wind up veering completely off course.
One of the clearest ways we can lead with heart and humility is to start with ourselves – to recognize when we are in over our heads, slowdown, and ask for help. By building the capacity to compassionately embrace our own difficulties with navigating the fluidity of change we are better able to extend this grace to our employees. And believe me, as your enterprise grows and shifts, they are also feeling this swirl of change, uncertainty, and disorientation too and, perhaps, the call to more boldly step forward in their own leadership journey.
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Leadership Development Practices to help you engage with these concepts in your own leadership development journey:
Pausing to Receive: This week pay attention to urges you have to double-down, head down, putting in twice the amount of effort to push through the obstacles in your way. When you notice this urge rise, take a moment to pause, lift your head, and take in the terrain around and within you. What has changed and what shifts in attention, action, or movement might now be called for?
