I recently spent a day in Sydney with my mentor group and my coach, and I found myself stepping into the wise elder territory (eek!) as I reflected on my approach to my business over the last 25 years. As I heard about the various life events people were dealing with (their own inflection points in their lives and businesses), I thought about my own business and where I’m at right now. As is often the case, I applied an approach I use with my coaching clients, the ‘dial up and dial down’ concept, to prompt my colleagues to reflect on what was required of them right now. What would be the impact (financial, emotional, family) of dialling things down for a period of time? There have certainly been times where I have needed to do that. Births, divorce, challenges with kids, parents in care, death of both parents, all required me to consciously choose what I would dial up and down and yes of course there were business impacts each time.
That same notion of dialling up and down can be applied to leadership. This idea of flexibility and choice in how we approach leadership is an essential aspect of my coaching. It’s never about changing who you are, and it’s not about fixing you, but rather, it’s about continually asking what’s required of me as a leader in the current context? What do I want to consciously dial up and what do I want to dial down?
For some people it’s obvious and the work we do together is to uncover patterns and habits of thinking (for the dial down behaviours) and develop strategies and techniques for the dial up behaviours. For most people, feedback from others in the form of the Leadership Circle Profile 360, provides clear direction about what the leader could dial up and down in order to be more effective in this current context. For example, if you need your team to become more accountable for their performance and your natural style is to map out everything that needs to be done and take control of all the key decisions, then your dial up may be around sharing the vision and being clear on what achieving success looks like. You might just need to dial down the desire for it to be exactly as you would do it.
Back to life… I’m thinking a lot about what I could dial up and down now that I have no children living at home, my parents have passed, I’m fit and healthy, have the support of my husband and I’m keen to see what I can do with my business.
Take a moment today to think about what you could be dialling up and dialling down in life and business. Let me know what you come up with.