As an executive leader, what can you control? At VIM Executive Coaching we respectfully answer this question for new clients all of the time?
The topic again came up just this past week when an executive leader came to us wringing her hands over the departure of a long-time, trusted employee. This event followed the departure of another key employee two weeks before that.
“I can only come to one conclusion,” she said with absolute certainty, “It must be me.”
In fact, she lost four employees over the past three months.
What Can You Control?
There are obviously things we can control, and things we can’t. When our client started to unburden her woes of self-blame, she explained that one employee left to be closer to her family, another accepted an offer that couldn’t be matched, one had not been performing up to standard despite counseling and the fourth simply woke up one morning and decided to pursue his dream of opening a coffee shop.
There was, in each of the cases, an added element of COVID, of each citing mental stress and the need to enjoy life.
“Where is this your fault?” we asked.
It is true – and certainly well documented – that lockdown during the worst of the pandemic did cause a kind of national malaise that led hundreds of thousands of people to uproot. And, it is also true that there is a strange type of unemployment that has affected many corporations, but such does occur during challenging times.
She conceded in the examples that she cited that were not necessarily her fault but they “might make people think I’m a poor executive leader.”
“Did you try to talk to them?” we asked.
Of course. In each case, she attempted to understand each person’s motivation and problem. In three of the four cases, she attempted to determine if there was anything to be done to alter the decision, to work with them to perhaps change their minds or to understand their motivations.
“Then you were being mindful.”
She did not understand.
Mindfulness
The mindful executive leader is aware by being self-aware. Mindfulness is borne of a need to be in the moment, to be centered and to respond to what is, rather than react to what isn’t.
Mindfulness must almost come out of our core, our authentic selves. Without being able to name her challenges, the executive leader did try to honestly and authentically reach each person and respond to their needs. Even the person who was counseled and who left, left on good terms.
“There is only one mistake you have made,” we mused. “You were so careful to be kind and considerate to others, you have not been mindful toward yourself.”
This comment puzzled her.
Self-awareness is not people pleasing nor does it mean self-deprecation. Mindfulness meditation, where we turn ourselves inward to calm and reflect ourselves, is a gentle and compassionate process. Pure mindfulness allows us to take care of ourselves and to discover our needs; to gain access to what we need to make us happier and better able to respond to the world around us.
It is all well and good that we try to talk a valued employee out of leaving the state to be near relatives, to try to reach an employee to assure her that perhaps a change of company might do her good, or even promising an employee you will visit his new coffee shop. However, at the end of the day, mindfulness demands we are kind to ourselves and that our decisions are grounded in our own authenticity.
We must own our mistakes, that is true, and mindfulness asks us to do that. However, those things beyond our reach, within reason, are not a burden we need to weigh down our souls.