You’ve got targets to hit. External market conditions are tough. Recruiting the right talent gets harder every day.
But you’ve made a plan with your team, and you know it’s good.
Bam!
You get hit with another company reorganisation.
“This new organisation structure is going to drive blah blah blah.”
Ugh.
You’re not even listening anymore.
Why can’t they stop reorganising long enough for you actually to get your job done?
How are you expected to perform in chaos?
Let me tell you a story, you will recognise it. It might even be your story. If you recognise any of this, let’s talk.
M got her first management role, got herself a leadership coach (moi) and had a solid, well thought out plan for developing into this new role of enabling her team to be great.
Strategic leader 101. M is off to a great start.
And then all hell broke loose.
Disruption 1: The company decided to reorganise everything: how to organise the teams, roles, responsibilities.
(you’ve had this happen too. I know you have. So keep reading)
Disruption 2: Oops, you donβt have a manager anymore due to the reorg. Thereβs no-one between you and the c suite.
Disruption 3: Here, your number of direct reports has tripled. Now you have to take care of 30 people. Through this uncertainty we’ve just created.
You’ve got to:
- Redesign how we work at this company
- Manage a boatload of people
- And still hit your targets
Chaos.
It’s so easy to drown in all of this. React to the urgent issue that’s all up in your face, everything else will have to wait.
The “this will have to wait” list gets longer and longer.
It’s enough to drive anyone crazy with frustration.
You want to do a good job, yet it seems impossible.
So how do you still do a good job amongst this chaos and not burnout?
M and I worked together over 6 months and got her to her goal of getting through this sane, healthy, and still having achieved her leadership development goals.
She held on to:
what kind of a leader did she want to be.
how to have better one to oneβs with all of her direct reports. All of them. In less time.
grabbing her courage to gather and give highly effective feedback.
doing her best. getting into the mess of everything with her team and working it out together
regularly recharging so she can keep on taking action
She let go of:
Knowing what she was doing. Because sometimes she didn’t and had to make a best guess. (that’s how all leaders actually do it)
Needing all the answers.
Getting frustrated when she got stuck. Instead, we worked it out in a coaching session.
This is how she showed that she is a great leader: she stayed.
Not at the company (although she did stay). She stayed with her growth plan, with her ambitions for herself.
She stayed with her team to help them through it all.
She built trust and authority. Yes! With all of this going on. Isn’t she amazing?
This is why I love my job. I get to help amazing people like you who are dealing with a lot of chaos and uncertainty at work.
To stay focused.
To stay in your zone of genius.
To recover when you want to quit, so you can make a good choice about when and if you leave.
Access your strength so you can handle this chaos and not burn out.
So if your workplace is in chaos, upheaval, or going through “interesting times” (Terry Pratchett reference), then let’s talk.
This post is part of my special Coaching Tips Series. This series was inspired by my clients and the core themes in their challenges. When we can apply these tips, we bring a lot of ease into our lives and step into our leadership. Want to talk it through with me? Call me and letβs make a Game Plan together.