I recently attended a coaching workshop, which started by outlining the many challenges facing leaders and their teams in this current business climate. Among them were:
- Being expected to produce more, with greater quality, but with fewer resources
- Adapting and innovating even faster by becoming more agile
- Finding the right formula to run a business while transforming it.
While these are stimulating challenges and legitimate opportunities to increase efficiency and revenue, I found myself having a visceral reaction to the words MORE, FEWER, FASTER, and RUNNING-WHILE-TRANSFORMING.
I’m struck by how many of my clients are already stretched and stressed to the max at work. While some feel well supported and are succeeding at integrating work and life in a healthy way, more are struggling to find breathing room in the midst of significant flux.
I have clients where so many corners have already been cut and resources reduced, they are seriously impeded from giving their best. And, it’s not their fault!
Despite the abundance of rhetoric about work/life balance, too many of my clients (and, I’m sorry to say, my female leaders especially) are still exhausted from juggling too much, which is now exacerbated by the too easy imposition of communication pings with expectations of response at random hours.
Lay-offs are ubiquitous. I’ve had clients who walked into work one day and walked out two hours later without a job (in one case, after 18 years of tenure!)
And my clients who have survived cuts deal with survivor’s guilt as they watch great colleagues—as well as less stellar performers—lose their jobs. They very understandably wonder if/when they will be next.
What is the breaking point?
When is the short-term gain (and for whom) a short-sighted setup for long term loss (and for whom)?
When does the relentless pursuit of satisfying investors leave a wake of overwhelm, strain, frustration, neglected families, and poor health that washes out the bigger societal benefit?
So, when I hear “more,” and “fewer,” and “faster,” and “running while transforming” in this context, my heart feels especially for the middle and frontline managers I work with who too often run on adrenalin to make it all work.
As a leadership coach, it’s my job to stand by my clients, walk the road with them, and help them find their best path forward.
More and more, my work focuses on helping clients build resilience, determine what is essential for success, negotiate priorities, and set stronger boundaries!
And, I help them frame what agility means to them, (which doesn’t always have to imply "fewer" or "faster") and how to make it work.
In my small way, I’m committed to fostering business cultures that pay more attention to why, how, and when corners are cut, and for whom, and that have courage to declare “no” when the cost, from a more wholistic perspective, is too much.
My vision is seeing my clients creating value in environments that champion the pursuit of quality with optimum resources, at a robust but reasonable pace, in a way that allows them to embrace their whole, human lives!
Yours on the journey,
Martha