The Nature of Leadership and Career

read time 5 minutes

The Nature of Leadership and Career is a weekly newsletter where I provide 1 illustration and ~3 ideas to help you connect to your career, leadership, or work journey more naturally.

If you are reading this online for the first time. Please consider subscribing.

Today at a glance

• Illustration of the week

  - They key to combat all-or-nothing thinking

• The Nature of Leadership + Career

  - When your feelings conflict with your leadership role

  - Examples of black and white thinking in leadership and our careers

  - Tools to navigate the grey space

Illustration of the week

Follow on Instagram and Linkedin.

The Nature of Leadership + Career

I was reading an excellent article this week When Your Feelings Conflict with Your Leadership Role by Dina Denham Smith.

This is perhaps the hardest leadership challenge because it compromises your values and what you can manage in your circle of control.

Let’s keep in mind a recent example we are all familiar with in some form: your organization’s approach to return to office, hybrid, or remote working.

Until I read this article, I was very black-and-white in my thinking: if you don’t agree with your organization’s policy:

A) You tow the company line because you need to keep your job, don’t have the courage to speak-up, or have an avoidant style.

B) You quit because you won’t compromise your values, beliefs, and behaviors.

In the article, Dina Denham Smith gives 4 great tools to navigate times “when you’re feeling conflict with your leadership role”. The tool that stuck with me the most was “deep acting”.

As I’ve replayed this article and the new tools which helped me curb my black and white approach, I have wondered:

🧠 How many of our leadership and career decisions are blurred by black and white (also known as all-or-nothing “cognitive distortion”).

🧠 Do we navigate to black and white to avoid discomfort or uncertainty or because we want to avoid uncertainty or because we haven’t been exposed to tools that help us navigate the grey?

I think probably both as I considered the following conflicting leadership and career situations I have experienced or observed in others:

Leadership

• A lack of / or surface level Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging policies and initiatives.

• The organization’s approach to making numerous employees redundant (e.g. email saying you have been made redundant and all access to systems cut off that day).

• Their organization greenwashing their environmental and social sustainability numbers and initiatives.

• An organizational restructure that results in you leaving a team you’ve nurtured to high performance to lead a different team or even step aside from your leadership role.

• The organization keeps a senior leader who “delivers” yet has multiple bullying and harassment claims lodged against them.

Careers

• Measuring your work product as a success if you get external validation or a failure if you get any critique.

• Quitting a job you love because of a horrible boss or because you didn’t get a promotion.

• Needing to reach level XX by age XX and on salary XXXXXX “to have made it.”

• Believing that the leadership team is shortsighted because they kill off your product/feature/project.

• Not choosing a company or career pathway you want because you think you might not be able to support your desired lifestyle.

I’m sure you can name many more.

How do we swim in the grey?

When I showed the illustration for this issue to my husband his first question was, what are the tools?

The answer might not be popular, but it holds: the specific tool depends on the context.

However, in each scenario, in order to navigate the grey, the two broad toolsets fall into:

Rational and tactical tools that focus on:

• Reframing or viewing the situation from different vantage points

• Thinking in options and probabilities

• How to decide

Emotional Tools that focus on:

• Energy management

• Healthy coping mechanisms

• Feelings and values exploration

Ultimately, we might still choose the black or white option.

This is neither good nor bad.

Having the power to navigate the grey enables us to do that in a more informed way at a head and heart level.

 Reach out if you are going through your own black or white career or leadership transitions and would like to discuss coaching support.

Find out more about me here.

Catch up on recent issues of The Nature of Leadership + Career

• Amplify or Unravel? The 3 types of leaders shaping your leadership

• How your scarcity mindset impacts your decision making and empathy + 3 ways to override it

• 3 career X-factors that most generalists ignore

Share The Nature of Leadership + Career

If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, please share it with your family and friends.

If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to receive them every Friday directly to your inbox.