- Leadership struggles reveal opportunities to embrace vulnerability, cultivate resilience, ignite growth
- Align core values and relationships to recharge energy and inspire positive momentum
- Small, focused changes transform challenges into stepping stones for sustainable leadership success
As leaders, we’re expected to have things under control. We’re counted on to navigate our organisations through challenges, keep morale high, and deliver results. But the truth is, beneath that exterior of control, many of us are struggling.
The Reality of Modern Leadership: Acknowledging the Struggle
We live in an anxious world. According to the World Health Organisation, anxiety and depression rates soared by 25% in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. This anxiety isn’t limited to our personal lives—it seeps into our professional roles, especially for leaders.
Business leaders are at the forefront of these pressures, and their load is only increasing. They are striving to stay ahead of the curve, facing pressure to grow, increase profitability, manage expenses, and cultivate work environments where talented individuals thrive and stay for the long haul.
We’re dealing with a workforce that’s more worried and uncertain than ever. The pandemic disrupted not only our health but also our economic systems, our ways of working, and our sense of security.
Believe it or not, it’s okay to admit that we don’t have everything under control. We can’t change what we don’t acknowledge—by owning our challenges, we can start taking proactive steps to manage them rather than simply trying to maintain an image of control.
One of the most damaging myths in leadership is the idea that we must be strong and invulnerable. This myth not only isolates us but also prevents us from seeking the help and support we need. Leaders need support, too. We can only take our teams as far as we’ve gone ourselves, so it’s crucial that we prioritise our own well-being.
Practical Strategies for Managing the Load
Here are some practical strategies for managing the pressures of leadership and creating a healthier, more sustainable approach:
1. Prioritise Relationships Inside and Outside of Work
As leaders, many of us have unintentionally sacrificed our most important and intimate relationships as increased responsibility, organisational demands, and ambition drive our decisions.
When we do this, connections become transactional. They become centred on what people can contribute to our quest for success rather than fostering mutually beneficial and supportive collaborations.
- Make it a habit to have one meaningful conversation a day. This could be with a colleague, friend, or family member. The key is to listen actively and engage genuinely.
- Reach out to people with whom you’ve lost touch. A simple message or phone call can bring a sense of connection and may even rekindle a relationship.
- Express gratitude to those around you regularly. This not only strengthens relationships but also shifts your focus toward the positive connections in your life.
- Schedule regular check-ins with your team or peers. These don’t always have to be about work—showing interest in their personal lives builds deeper connections.
- Join a group: Joining a community, such as a professional association, book club, or fitness group, can help you meet new people with shared interests.
2. Understanding what defines success and learning how to manage the tension when others define it differently
When we talk about “success” with others, we often mistakenly believe that we’re talking about the same thing. However, in reality, everyone defines success differently based on what they believe about themselves and the world around them.
If we don’t take the time to define what success means for us, not just in business but more broadly, in life, someone else will do that for us, and it may be vastly different to what we really want. How we define success is at the root of what motivates us and is critical to our leadership capacity.
The power of alignment
What we believe drives our behaviour. Equally, what we believe about success and how it is attained will determine the lengths and means we will go to achieve it.
How we define success is at the root of what motivates us and is critical to our leadership capacity. As Carol Dweck discusses in her book Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfill Your Potential.
I wholeheartedly agree with Dweck’s definition. Early in the research phase for my doctoral thesis, the power of alignment became a significant finding. It went beyond aligning efforts with goals to recognising a clear relationship between a leader’s values (more specifically, character) and focus (momentum) and their goals in order to achieve consistency and sustainability (performance).
3. Aligning our efforts with a set of values that drive performance and build resilience
Resilience does not and cannot happen in isolation. It is directly tied to the quality of our relationships and the degree to which we live in alignment with our values.
As we’ve already discussed, when our values in life and business align, our anxiety lessens, and we are able to create healthy boundaries. It is much easier to say “Yes” or “No” when we are clear on why.
As leaders, being clear on our values and how these are foundational to every decision we make and the way we model leadership to our teams, this builds confidence, resulting in trust and resilience. We do not talk about it enough in business—but safe boundaries and positive frameworks create environments where people can flourish.
4. Living with a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset allowing us to create a new narrative that moves us forward
This is a critical element in mitigating anxiety in our lives and those we lead. Your mindset plays a huge part in how you relate to people and the world in general. It will determine whether or not you develop strong, healthy relationships and your level of resilience in the face of trials.
Dr. Carol Dweck’s research has illuminated the pivotal role of mindset in setting the direction for our lives.
“For thirty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life? Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset— creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over.”3
The gap between our expectations and reality
Whether we realise it or not, we enter leadership roles with certain expectations. Universities, MBAs, our managers, and the leaders we admire fuel our beliefs as they become ingrained. We think we know how it will be, how to get from A to B, how to be successful, and how to create the life we’ve dreamed of.
And then reality sets in. We discover the gap between what we expected and the lived reality of leading a team, department, or organisation, which looks more like a yawning chasm. Leaders experience a combination of anxiety, shame, disillusionment, disappointment, and hurt, and many walk away from the organizations they have sown their lives into. Whether or not they can learn and grow from these experiences is largely down to their mindset.
A fixed mindset dismisses the ability for things to be different and better. If a senior leader believes that disappointment, hurt, and betrayal by those around them are just the way business is done, they condemn not only themselves but also those that lead to a life of looking over their shoulders, along with a hefty dose of chronic stress, anxiety, and likely burnout.
Developing a growth mindset
The starting point is being willing to change your beliefs about yourself and your place in the world because your “beliefs are the key to happiness (or misery).”
It is not about the wholesale dumping of deeply held convictions based on our life experience but rather about seeing them as a starting point from which to learn and grow.
Growth mindset organisations
Just as individuals have fixed or growth mindsets, organisations can also have a growth or fixed mindset culture. Studies involving Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies found that those with a fixed mindset culture are more likely to hire a handful of “geniuses”, believing that talent is fixed and not something that can be developed by encouraging and nurturing people throughout the business, a “culture of development”.
Moreover, while we might expect that trust is higher in a growth mindset culture—the more surprising finding was that employees believed that their organisation “supports (reasonable) risk-taking, innovation, and creativity.”
The bottom line is that leaders with a fixed mindset set a culture of unhealthy competition among a few labelled “talented” and then wonder why those they hired for their brilliance fail to flourish under the unrelenting pressure to achieve. On the other hand, leaders with a growth mindset encourage innovation and are rewarded with employees with a strong sense of ownership and commitment to their organisations.
If you want to begin the process of changing your mindset, here are a few thoughts to get you started.
What do you tell yourself about your life? Or, put another way, what’s the script that keeps going around in your head? Too many leaders continue to carry around resentment and blame others for what they experienced, creating only more pain for themselves and for others. How do we change this?
The first step is simply to recognise and then minimise the unhelpful internal voices. The next step is to minimise the noise and impact that too many external voices can have on their decision-making.
Understanding and learning to leverage your whole story, not just the parts we’re happy for the world to see, is a major key to developing a growth mindset and, ultimately, creating a new narrative in life and leadership.
5. Implementing needed change in the next 90 days to create a new trajectory
This brings us to our final strategy for helping senior leaders mitigate anxiety within themselves, those they love, and their organisations. When leaders operate purposefully, it inspires confidence and direction within their organisations, leading to higher engagement, improved decision-making, and a more resilient company culture.
The Power of Purpose
Do you know your purpose? In her best-selling book Grit: The Power of Passion And Perseverance, Angela Duckworth proposes that people who have a purpose beyond their comfort or advancement can keep going when the going gets tough.
“However they say it, the message is the same: the long days and evenings of toil, the setbacks and disappointments and struggle, the sacrifice—all this is worth it because, ultimately, their efforts pay dividends to other people. At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.”
Cultivating Hope
Hope is a powerful force in combating anxiety, and where hope is absent, people fail to thrive. If we believe that people, circumstances, and situations are conspiring against us, with no hope for relief—we soon move from anxiety to depression.
As leaders, we need to cultivate hope for ourselves first. But we are also in the perfect position to help others in our businesses do the same.
The Next 90 days
Dealing with or mitigating anxiety is not about removing life’s stressors because it is simply not possible. While it is true that there is no one cure-all for anxiety, improvement starts with a commitment to developing healthy relationships inside and outside work. The research tells us that when organisational leaders prioritise people, everyone wins because when people feel safe, seen, and heard, anxiety decreases.
Similarly, it is vital to identify and live consistently with a core set of values that reflect our priorities in life and what is most important to us. Alignment with our core values does more than simply abate anxiety; people feel safe, and trust is a natural consequence.
This is true in life and business. When people trust leadership, their ownership and commitment to an organisation increase, and the safety and security that ensue are the seedbed for innovation.
If these fundamental aspects are in place, people’s ability to bounce back after a setback increases exponentially. Character matters, and if we as leaders are aligned with our purpose, have trusted people who help keep us accountable, and live from our beliefs with a growth mindset, there is hope.
I work with leaders and teams to create new success trajectories for themselves and their organisations. I ask them to zero in on what really matters to them in business and their lives as a whole. We can’t compartmentalise our lives and expect success to flow in all areas.
It’s not only our personal script (or self-talk), lack of clarity, or the daily challenges we face that get in the way of our success. Sometimes, it’s our energy, or the lack of it, because we’re spread too thin across too many goals that conflict with our most important values.
Reflection is vital in this space. We need to step back from the daily minutiae so that we can zero in on what we need to do next. At this point, rather than trying to shift their trajectory all at once, I ask leaders, “What’s one change you can make today?”
When we sharpen our focus on what matters most, the next thing usually presents itself.
In June 2022, I facilitated a leadership retreat for an executive team of one of our clients in the U.K. It was clear that fatigue was a genuine issue. Although the business had exceeded all its goals during the COVID-19 pandemic, it had just experienced a quarter that fell below the projection. The fatigue didn’t have as much to do with one poor quarter as it was one more thing on top of the stresses and challenges of operating during a globally challenging season. What became evident during the day was that there was a much stronger focus on the 20 percent that wasn’t working, blinding them to the 80 percent that was working really well.
We took them through our SLIK™ process, where, as a team, they could align their efforts and priorities to get some serious momentum for the next 90 days. You could feel the energy returning. It was incredibly fulfilling to hear the CEO say at the end of the day, “I came in here feeling quite flat and discouraged, but now find myself incredibly excited and energised for the opportunities we have in front of us.”
It is a bit of a cliché because it’s true. Be the change you want to see in the world. If this has not been your experience in life or business, now is your opportunity to change it for others. As leaders, our ability to be change agents has never been greater.
In a world filled with uncertainty, the best leaders are those who are honest about their challenges and committed to growth. We might not have everything under control, but with the right strategies and support, we can navigate the journey with hope and resilience.
