Confidence in your Pocket Podcast Series – Leadership Confidence
EM:Hi there and welcome back, it’s Eilidh here and we’re going to go into our next Confidence in Your Pocket series and this one is all about leadership confidence. Now I’m here with my good friend, Jane Grant, and let me just say before I pass you onto here with our first question is that I’m Eilidh, I’m the speaker for confidence, helping people, empowering people, to be more confident, resilient and productive. So Jane I’ll allow you to introduce yourself now please.
JAG:Well hello there everybody and I’m an executive coach and work with you and teams to provide sharpening, if you like, of your leadership skills to help you think well for yourselves with rigour, with courage, with imagination and with grace so that you can achieve more for yourself and your business.
EM:Ok, question one coming your way, madam. We were talking about iTunes and music before we started so lets go with tuning up your leadership. How do you tune up your leadership confidence.
JAG:I think leadership confidence is really important and to be on the top of your game, tuning it up is important because others will be inspired by you and therefore what’s important is that to tune it up you need to believe in yourself, because of course if you don’t believe in yourself, how can other people believe in yourself, so being confident in who you are as a leader is something that will be really critical as you begin to step into your leadership potential.
EM:Very good. What was it exactly that made you decide to help people hone their confidence talents?
JAG:I think for me Eilidh, throughout my professional life working within HR for a number of years and moving into leadership coaching is that in my own experience I realise that it took me time to develop my own confidence in actually who was I as an individual, as an HR manager, HR director and then as a coach actually changing careers and developing my leadership confidence there.
What I found was that it was really important to find out who I was in terms of what I stood for and where I wanted to go in my life with my business and so therefore I feel very privileged to have developed and worked in this way, specifically on personal leadership, which is about setting a clear vision for yourself and then creating some goals around where you want to go, communicating effectively and with confidence and then letting other people know where you’re going and then as you grow, developing and working with others so that you have a team that feels inspired it can support you and really help achieve that vision that you have for your business.
Because of my own business development in terms of achieving and working in my own practice now, I love to share and support other people think really well for themselves and confident in terms of being clear, confident and courageous in their own leadership.
EM:I like that. Clear, confident and courageous. So with those three words in mind, what other strategies would you give people to develop their self-belief as a leader?
JAG:Well I think it’s this idea of being authentic and in fact only recently I was attending an event, What’s the Big Deal about Authenticity? by our good friends Voice at the Table and it was interesting to hear the women’s stories there, very successful women from different varieties of industry and I think the first thing is this idea of getting clear on who we are, so being curious, understanding our strengths and skill set and knowing what is the environment that is best suited for you and thinking about how and where you can add the most value, i.e. what people will pay for.
I think also it’s important to be clear about your own vision, your own personal vision, i.e. what do you want to achieve in your life? Where do you want to be going in your life? Who do you want to be spending time with and how do you want to be spending that time? and then to really communicate that with others so that others can come along with you on your journey and of course leadership is really about achieving things through others. It’s being able to galvanise and work with a team so they feel inspired and can share that journey with you and as part of that, as a leader you’re developing the talent and skills of those around you.
EM:And so what do you think maybe one or two challenges are that leaders face when they have a lack of self-esteem, self-belief, what do you think the challenges are?
JAG:I think the key challenge is actually right here, it’s our mindset. I think what often trips us up and becomes a challenge is how our mind is and what we’re saying to ourselves. It’s really a lot about assumptions, the assumptions that in fact are untrue, but we live as if they’re true. So if we’re stepping into a leadership role or growing into a bigger leadership role, sometimes the challenge is we plague ourselves with the thought that, “I don’t know if I’m good enough. I better just look over my shoulder to check that no one can catch me or figure out that maybe I’m not really supposed to be here.”
I think that is the single biggest challenge that any of us have when we’re stepping up into leadership, and it’s about really managing that mindset, unblocking if you like, liberating those unhelpful and limiting assumptions. We can create new, liberating ones instead and being open to the possibility of what we can achieve and stepping into our own potential.
EM:Yes, I totally agree with you and in fact, I’ve just recorded a video recently talking about the voices in your head and it’s so important that people believe and understand that the voices never go away so you’re constantly having to put these gremlins out of your head because they will come in on a frequent basis. It is something that leaders have to anticipate and welcome and say, “Oh there’s that negative voice again. Let’s deal with it,” and develop a coping strategy for getting rid of the negativity. Very, very good. So is there anything they could do today to be a more confident and effective leader?
JAG:For sure. I think it’s about staying on top of your game. We talked at the beginning about how can we tune up our leadership and for me it’s about taking time to invest in your professional development as a leader. What I mean by that, it’s about seeking opportunities to grow your skills and experience, not only inside your organisation but it might be outside. For example, those of you who are wanting to develop your speaking skills, you may not only hire a wonderful coach like Eilidh but you may also want to consider joining a speaking class and you’d be developing your speaking skills outside of the work environment.
The second thing I would encourage to really develop your leadership is to develop your network, again both internally and externally and meeting with other people and working with people who you are inspired by, who you see as a potential role model for yourself, some leaders that really stand out for you and notice what they do and how they are. That’s not that you’re going to copy them, because it’s about finding your own authentic style of leadership, but also being in the presence and the company of good leaders, in your mind, by developing your network can really help to increase your confidence.
The last thing I would say, having done those two, is to find opportunities to move outside your comfort zone. Now whilst that might sound scary, when you're moving outside your comfort zone, this is the time that you will achieve, if you like, the biggest transformation because that’s when we’re in a crisis or a different environment. We can pull on those resources that we have naturally but sometimes it’s mindset that gets in the way. That is when we can also become more confident and celebrate the success we’ve had by stepping into our potential and being bold in what we’ve agreed to do for ourselves.
EM:They are all very valid points and the last one I would add to that is consider joining a mastermind group. I have brokered many an introduction. I just love to introduce people. I like to introduce CEO to CEO when I find people that I just know will get on well. Sometimes it’s a case of introduce them on LinkedIn and let them explore. It’s definitely a case of the leaders are breathing rarified air. It’s not everybody that is in that room. There’s less people each time they move up a step so it’s getting them support inside and outside of their organisation who give them the opportunity to explain how it is, warts and all, and mastermind groups are tremendously powerful, as you well know.
EM:So closing this off then, Jane, one example perhaps where you can talk about where you have worked with somebody and given them confidence boost and improved their leadership confidence.
JAG:An example for me, I helped a client fairly recently step into her leadership and she was at a stage in the organisation when she felt really undervalued. She didn’t feel that her skills and her talents, if you like, were being particularly recognised and as a result she began to really lose confidence in herself and her leadership. So working together through coaching her together, coaching with her, what I was able to do was to help shine the light so she could get closer once more to the skills and capabilities that she was really good at. So to be able to articulate those clearly in a way that differentiates her from her other board members.
Secondly, I worked with her to get clear on what she stood for. What were the values that were important for her as a leader in her organisation and then how she could communicate those with confidence and now, I’m delighted to say that she’s re-energised, she’s reinvigorated and she’s a key part of the board, helping the organisation soon to go through a major restructure in merging with another organisation and she’s committed and willing and keen to see that organisation right through to who knows what will happen in terms of the merger at the end of the day as to whose roles will be staying, but she’s committed now having pulled on those strengths and that confidence in her leadership to support the organisation and her own development moving forward.
EM:Excellent. Well, yet again Jane it’s been a joy talking to you. Just as you were saying you’d invigorated your client, I hope we have invigorated our listeners. You certainly have done that for me this morning. Thank you, it’s goodbye from me Eilidh, the speaker for confidence.
JAG:And it’s goodbye from me, the executive coach helping you think well for yourselves, with rigour, courage, imagination and grace.
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