VIM Executive Coaching prides itself on maintaining strict confidentiality. We dearly value our clients.
It is because of that connection that we can share, in confidence, that in our experience we’ve not seen so many executive leaders concerned as to “their center.” A common fallback statement goes something like this:
“I don’t know whether it was the pandemic, virtual meetings, hybrid meeting complaints, the fears over ‘saying the wrong thing,’ politics or whatever, but I always feel as though I have lost my center and my connection with my co-workers.”
You mean you believe you’ve lost your center?
“Yes, in a way.”
Why should we be surprised?
Why should any one of us be surprised when feelings of disconnect and losing our centers have taken over our once centered and even self-assured lives? The world went through a huge seismic shift over the past four or five years.
Though we have been steadfast in our observation that the changes, all of them, were occurring anyway, we have also noted that the movement toward virtual meetings, hybrid workplaces and such was occurring at a snail’s pace prior to 2019, but became a “roadrunner,” at the start of lockdowns.
Who was truly prepared for the rapidity of the change? No one.
The key, now, in 2024 is to find the centers so many have lost.
Will things ever return to “normal?” Well, our counter-thought is a simple, “When was anything ‘normal’ in the work place?” Change is the one constant. Whether manufacturing brought in new production machinery or IT installed new accounting and HR software systems, or sales opened branch offices in five new cities, change has always been with us.
For every organization undergoes change, good and bad. It is in the act of holding onto the status quo that becomes difficult. The sheer energy required to hold on to change, is often more painful than to develop the flexibility to go with that change.
After 2022, give or take, there were executive leaders who defiantly pounded boardroom desks to insist everyone be physically at work, 100-percent of the time. There were executives who loathed virtual meetings and who wanted everyone in the office to meet and greet in person. More insidiously, there are executive leaders who raged against social constructs such as DEI and who have maintained that nothing needed to change, there were executives who even tried to force their politics or other biases down organizational throats.
What we now know
In the end, executives who were intractable in their positions watched good people leave. They stood there, flummoxed, as the exit door saw thousands leave. However, and for the most part, many executive leaders (truly good people) could not handle the changes that occurred as their deceptively stable workplaces transformed. They had no idea how to adjust.
To lose a center is problematic. To cling to “the old ways” is more difficult. To dig-in is to lose mindfulness. The act of an executive who refuses to be mindful to change or at least, to consider options and possibilities, is the essence of intentionally destroying the center.
VIM Executive Coaching strives to help executive leaders regain that center. The problem isn’t the changing workplace, the problem is to grip to a vision that no longer serves. The opportunity is to embrace new possibilities and new experiences. It is in that embrace where mindfulness shines.
Where, exactly, is the center? We cannot answer that, the executive leader must ask that of themselves. Finding that center is not fear-laden but liberating. As to change, who can predict the future? No one. We can predict that the most mindful will be the most prepared.