In the creative and technology services space, your people are your product, so to speak. You care about your team. I know you do. Yet, I often hear from leader transformation coaching clients that they want to do right by their people, but that it’s hard to balance with getting the most out of them in order to increase profitability. And therein lies the problem.
Unconscious vs. conscious leadership
If we take a step back to understand that profitability is a lagging indicator and is directly impacted by how valued and supported our employees feel, we might begin to understand that it’s our lack of consciousness that has created polarity between caring and earning.
I was recently on a call with a client. She was frustrated and even angered by the fact that one of her employees was unavailable for forty-five minutes in the middle of the day. As it turned out, the employee was helping her mother-in-law outside in the garden because she and her husband were staying with his parents due to COVID, and the woman asked for assistance. The agency owner couldn’t believe that the employee would be offline for that amount of time in the middle of the day when she was being paid and clients demanded a response within minutes. When I asked if the employee ever worked past the typical end-of-day, she said yes, and often. When I asked if clients were actually demanding near-immediate response or if it was the owner herself who had put that unofficial policy in place, she paused.
Having the luxury of an outsider’s view, I helped her dive into the possibility that she was compensating for her own fear of being seen as unresponsive or incompetent — and therefore imposing that on her employee. Even deeper than that may have been a fear of failure because this owner was the primary breadwinner for her family. Lastly, she realized that she moved through the world with a scarcity mindset, which created the belief that there will never be enough time, clients, money, etc., and that resulted in feelings of stress and anxiety. Can you see how it all circles back to her chief complaint about the employee, which was, in reality, a reflection of her own fear?
While unconscious leaders are reactive and their ego often runs the show, conscious leaders are — by contrast — supremely self-aware, lead with authenticity, listen actively and intently, and hold themselves accountable. Conscious leaders don’t have the need to know all the answers. They have the desire to succeed as part of a whole, but are not attached to the outcome of winning due to an abundance mindset.
Be honest: which one sounds more like you on a daily basis? This is a no-judgment zone.
Why is change beckoning?
For most shop owners, how we’ve been leading our teams cannot and will not look anything like it did in the past. The period of cocooning we’ve all experienced over the majority of 2020 has provided the opportunity for some serious introspection. This year has been the inflection point for leaders and employees alike, in that we’ve been given the permission we needed to pause, dive inward, learn who we are, what we really want, and what kind of legacy we want to leave.
Conscious leadership is in high demand because the prior paradigm of fear-based, top-down, win-at-all-costs management is collapsing — and the call to become our true selves is very loud. Even if you’re skeptical about the collapse in progress, I’m sure that we can at least agree that it was never sustainable to devalue people and the planet for the purpose of profit.
People want to work at organizations that value their input, support their individual desires for growth and expansion, and trust them to do good work on behalf of clients. Many of them want that to extend to the environment — to know that they work for a company that cares about its eco-impact, no matter how small. And they want to be able to trust conscious leaders who:
Know and trust themselves (instead of being unaware and insecure);
Take care of themselves (instead of burning out);
Regulate their emotions (instead of being reactive);
Express their vulnerability (instead of walling up);
Ask for input (instead of needing to have all the answers); and
Listen to understand (instead of to reply).
If this is not how you lead today, can you imagine the liberation that comes with being wholly yourself? Not needing to solve everything yourself? Not wondering whether or not your employees will leave? It’s hard work to keep up two different personas — your authentic, genuine self at home and your boss persona at work — isn’t it?
“Conscious awareness in the leader cultivates awareness in the system.”
— Dr. Cheryl Moen Vermey
The good news is that you don’t have to do it anymore.
Conscious leadership as a legacy
Perhaps one of the clearest examples of present-day conscious leadership was Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos, who tragically died in November, at the age of 46.
Just a few years ago, many called his management style “unorthodox.” The idea that a leader was in a position primarily to support the growth, fulfillment and joy of individual employees seemed ludicrous. But it worked, and the “Money Follows Value” concept below illustrates why.
The New York Times recently described him as a soft-spoken and introspective executive. Pause at introspective because that’s exactly what enabled him to become a conscious leader.
Conscious awareness is cultivated from the inside out; there are no short-cuts. That practice enabled Hsieh to develop a philosophy of business built around the idea that happy employees were the conduit to satisfied customers who would return again and again. In 2010, he wrote “Delivering Happiness,” which codified his approach — which, by the way, resulted in the sale of Zappos to Amazon for a cool $1.2 billion in 2009. He stepped down as chief executive in August after 21 years with the company.
"Imagine a greenhouse, where maybe at a typical company, the CEO might be the strongest and tallest, most charismatic plant that all the other plants strive to one day become,” said Hseih in 2017 in an NPR interview. “For me, I really think of my role as more about being the architect of the greenhouse, and then all the plants inside will flourish and thrive on their own.”
I don’t know about you, but thinking about conscious leaders as “architects of their greenhouses” moves me. I’m grateful to visionaries like Tony Hseih because they show us what’s possible when we get curious, challenge norms and limitations, trust our intuition, and lead with “fun and a little weirdness.”
Where to begin
If all of this resonates, in that you’ve been thinking a lot about your shop and team, and how you show up for them as a leader — perhaps how that has impacted your spouse or family as well — then your natural next question might be, “How do I start to make the changes necessary to be in alignment with what I really want?”
As you’ve already recognized, awareness is the first step and it sounds like your awareness has been growing day by day over the last nine months. For most leaders, working on mindset comes next. With my clients, we do that through the practice of mentally and emotionally reframing things that happen at work and at home. We may even step back into some of the events or conditions present in your childhood that shaped you to think, speak or act in certain ways that helped to ensure that your basic physiological needs were met, but have become some of the very things that are holding you back as an adult.
Conscious Leadership calls owners to not just focus on business, but also requires that we work on self-limiting beliefs, value-centricity, and how all of that expresses as the owner, spouse, parent, and community member. The world is demanding a collective upleveling; when will you begin?
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