During tough times we often feel that life is hard. All these decisions we have to make can drag us down. It can seem like rocks and boulders block our way – we may even recognise that we put some of them there in the first place. But a simple change of perspective can make all the difference in our experience.

An inexperienced fisherman was out on a fine river looking to catch a trout. He ran upstream and downstream looking for the best place to fish, not really knowing what to look for. He picked a fast flowing, shallow area where he could see the fish running and started to cast his fly. He tripped and stumbled, cursed his luck and poor decision making and caught nothing all morning.

You don’t need a good coach, you need a great one!

You get fitter faster if you work out with a trainer. Work out regularly with one of the best trainers in the world and you get world-class results. So it is with your career.

This is the final and most important shift that aspiring leaders must make: to invest in yourself through world-class coaching and mentoring.

How many times have you heard that? Lots, I am sure. But how many times have you acted on it? For most readers, the sad answer will be not at all. Many others will have invested and had a poor or average experience. Only a few will be shouting from the rafters about their coaches and mentors. And it is these people who know the secret of success. The secret is finding great coaches and mentors.

So what is the difference between coaching and mentoring, and how can you find a great one? I like to keep things simple on this front:

• A mentor is someone who has the t-shirt: they’ve made it big in the area that you aspire to be great in and they are willing to share the lessons they have learned along the way to fast track your progress. They’ll usually do this for free, but you will get limited access to them as a result
• A coach is someone who will help you wear the t-shirt yourself. They will understand your challenges and help you solve them. They may not be a deep subject matter expert in your particular business, but they should have a range of tools and techniques that can fast track your work to find answers

The common thread between coaching and mentoring is YOU. You have to do the work, you have to apply yourself, you have to adapt if you are going to succeed.

So how do you find world-class coaches and mentors?

Let’s start with mentoring. Ideally you should have more than one of these, and the trick here is that they need not be around in person. Look for people who have played at the top of their game – both past and present – in your business and in others. Who do you admire? Who has succeeded and left clues for you? What books you can read about them? Who can you ask to be your mentor? Find out the big moves they made and how they applied themselves. Study their success and mirror what they did. Success leaves clues, and you can learn from those clues, whether your mentor is able to share time with you in the flesh or not.

Unfortunately, it is actually harder to find a world-class business coaches. The field of coaching has exploded in recent years, and to mix metaphors, it is a jungle out there. Coaches abound who will sell you snake oil and tell you it is what the champions drink. And coaches abound who will say they can solve your problems but don’t have the experience and insight needed to enable you to do the work. So be careful and look for clues about what makes a coach great:

• They will have rave reviews from their clients and will have dealt with any negative feedback openly and honestly. You may have found them through direct recommendation which is the strongest evidence of all
• They will spend time getting to know you and your specific situation rather than dish out cookie cutter advice. They should be willing to do this on a trial basis and should offer an inexpensive exit if, after a few sessions, you decide that particular coach is not for you
• Great coaches will also have an additional offer: they will put you together with other coachees so that you can learn from each other as well as the coach. This accelerates your learning curve and gives you a peer group that will last for life. Everybody wins.

This is the final shift you need to make in order to dominate your career, but all five are important. Here they are again:

1. Embrace being uncomfortable and engage your heart
2. Get strategic and solve your own problems
3. Create momentum by creating focus and taking coherent action
4. Unleash the full power of your teams
5. Invest in yourself through world-class coaching and mentoring

These are the shifts you need to make to create the life you aspire to. You deserve that life. So go out and start creating it now.

Now you have a choice. You can take these insights and continue to work alone. Or you can reach out to find world-class coaches and mentors to fast track your progress. If you decide on the latter course want help exploring your options, please do contact me at www.brightlingadvisory.co.uk. We’d be happy to point you in the right direction.

How to unleash your team’s full potential

No individual can make amazing things happen alone. Evolution has conspired to favour species that work together effectively. So it is in business.

This is the fourth shift that aspiring leaders must make: to unleash your teams.

There is much confusion about what this really means. People talk about leading from within, heart-based leadership, authentic leadership, leading without a title and so on. These may all be great concepts but the truth is that leadership is a process, not a style or concept.

As you work towards unleashing your teams you’ve got to adapt your approach and style to make sure that the right building blocks are in place.

A great friend of mine, Eric Fleming, developed the following model to explain this. Eric is a psychiatrist and fantastic organisational development specialist, and together we have tested his model across a wide range of organisations. It works exceptionally well and gets rave reviews from executives and teams around the world. He’s writing a book about it, so look out for that.

There are five levels that teams must progress through in order to be unleashed effectively:

Level 1: Establish and clarify. Make sure your team are clear about roles and responsibilities. If they (or you) don’t understand who is doing what and have clarity what needs to get done, then you are not even at base camp. Get there fast! Be direct. Clear?

Level 2: Engage and align. Do your team understand your vision and are they clear about your goals for the business? Are they fully committed to helping you achieve these? Ask better questions and coach them to make sure you know they’ve got it. This is just the second level. Keep going if you’ve got this far.

Level 3: Enable and equip. Establish and develop knowledge, skills and resourcefulness. Attract great people with the best skills and talent and invest in them once they have agreed to work with you. Be a great mentor to them. Remember that giving people the best chance of success in their long-term careers will give you the best chance of long-term success in your business.

Level 4: Empower. Give people accountability. If you want to achieve results beyond your current potential, then you’ve got to trust others. Harness the talent in your team by giving them accountability and responsibility to sort out things and get things done. Make sure that they (and you) keep learning and growing. Better never ends.

Level 5: Extend and unleash. Now you can push your team to break new ground. Now you can provide challenge and pressure where it is most needed. Now you can achieve outstanding and delight your customers. Now you can create raving fans that return to you time and again and recommend your business products or services to others.

Your management style needs to be different at each level. Initially, you will to be more direct. As you progress you will need to coach and mentor more. And as you unleash you teams you can be much more challenging.

Many leaders move far too early to challenge without working through the earlier stages. They get stressed and want to make change happen fast; and so they start to challenge and push without those earlier foundations in place. These leaders frequently fail. But those who build firm foundations succeed.

Think about it. Steve Jobs, one of the most challenging leaders of our generation, broke new ground that others could only dream of. And yet he went through each stage in succession as he rescued Apple from financial ruin. Before he rescued Apple, people were not clear about the best business strategy and internal conflict was rife. He went back to basics, identifying just four key products that would make Apple cool again. He cut the rest and focused on enabling, equipping and empowering the right people and teams to succeed. Only once he had these foundations in place was he able to extend Apple’s products and services, creating the most valuable company in the world in the process. Only by going through this process was he able to unleash his teams and challenge and stretch them, arguably even beyond the grave. That is his legacy.

What will be your legacy? How will you unleash your teams to achieve their full potential?

Make it happen!

Once you’ve set your strategy, you’ve got to make it happen. Once you’ve clarified what to do, you’ve got to do it. Once you’ve decided on your destination, you’ve got to set sail. It’s that simple.

This is the third shift that all aspiring leaders must make: to create momentum.

But so many people get distracted. They prefer to do their email, check their social media, or pick some other minor task that feels more important or more achievable than working towards their top goals.

Why is that? What holds people back from achieving their biggest goals? In my experience, it is generally one of two simple reasons:

1. Fear of success: if you were to achieve your goals and have the success you dream of, other things would change. The life you currently live would no longer be the same. You may, subconsciously, not have dealt with this fully and instinctively prefer to stay within your current safety zone
2. Fear of failure: what if you try and don’t succeed? What will people make of you? What will you make of yourself? Will your effort have been worth it? Or should you focus on those minor tasks you know you cannot fail to deliver?

To tackle these fears, as with any others, you’ve got to take them head on. As Susan Jeffers said, “feel the fear and do it anyway!”

Take focused action. Focus each day on your goals. I urge you to physically write down your goals and the key steps you need to take towards them. Do this each and every day – at least in short form. It tattoos into your conscious brain what you need to focus on and encourages your subconscious brain to filter for what’s going to help as you go through the day.

And as you take daily, focused action make sure that you’ve got a great planning system to keep you on track. Break down your goals into more achievable “way markers” and plot and adjust your actual course against these, much as in sailing: a long journey has points along the way that the navigator will steer the ship towards and make adjustments against as the boat moves through currents, winds and waves.

I encourage the individuals, teams and organisations I work with to break down their goals into quarterly objectives; for the next quarter to break these down into monthly objectives; and for the next month to break these down into weekly objectives. Then you can plan your days and know you’re heading in the right direction, even if you get blown a bit of course sometimes. This system enables you to track, readjust and get back on course.

If your goals are musts that truly engage your heart, if you are fully committed to achieving them and if you use a great system to plan and focus your time, you will turn your strategy into action and achieve great results fast.

One final productivity tip on creating momentum is to focus your time and energy into 90 minute blocks: carve four 90 minute blocks into your day and spend those blocks working on your top goals in a focused, coherent and concerted way. It doesn’t matter what you do in between but during these peak productivity blocks turn off your social media, email and phone and use that time to produce. Focus, focus, focus! You will amaze yourself. I promise you.

Is your strategy failing?

Why do corporate strategies fail? Why do consultancy firms often say, “It was the execution of the strategy that was the problem, not the strategy itself”? Or when government policy fails why do politicians give some variant Harold MacMillan’s alleged explanation: “Events, dear boy, events!”

This is the second shift that all successful leaders need to make: you’ve got to get strategic. And this means moving from having others define your goals to taking control and saying, “This is what needs to change and here is how.”

Why you are best placed

I’ve seen businesses and governments spend lots of money and time writing detailed strategies with one of two outcomes: the strategy either sits on a shelf and nothing happens or, alternatively, it gets implemented and chaos ensues.

Of course, it’s not always this bad, but it happens far too often. And it happens because those designing the strategy have not fully understood the challenges and the people involved; and they don’t adjust as they learn more about what is or is not working.

Well guess what! As a leader of your organisation, you do understand your challenges and your people, and you are best placed to judge what is or is not working and make adjustments accordingly. So you are best placed to develop the strategic insight and leadership that your organisation so badly needs.

Four questions to ask

1. Are you crystal clear about how to solve your biggest corporate challenges?
2. Do you always project confidence, strength and clarity in key meetings and events?
3. Are you creating sufficient drive and momentum across your organization?
4. Are all your staff clear about what needs to happen?

If the answer to any of these is anything but a resounding “YES!” then you’ve got to work on your strategic skills.

What makes for good strategy?

Imagine going to a great doctor with a significant medical problem. The great doctor will not move quickly to prescribe. Rather, she will listen carefully to you and your symptoms, she may run further tests and she may seek opinions from other specialists before making a diagnosis and recommending what to do.

So it is with great strategy. You’ve got to:

• Understand the problem: listen, watch, see, hear and feel what’s going on
• Reach a clear and accurate diagnosis: sift for the important facts and insights
• Set a clear plan of action: make sure it is achievable and act with conviction

How to develop your strategic skills

• Seek first to understand: spend time working through the issues and challenges that your organization faces; don’t move too fast to solutions. Look at different angles and challenges and listen to a wide range of opinions. With a deep understanding of what is going on you will be far better placed to develop your strategy.
• Speak plainly: don’t use fluffy phrases and management speak to hide woolly thinking. Steve Jobs did this brilliantly. He got down to hard tacks and asked very simple, direct questions to get to the heart of the matter
• Take an outsider’s perspective: if you can’t explain it to an outsider (your mother, a customer, a friend) then you probably don’t understand it well enough. Don’t get caught up in all the technical detail – just keep asking yourself whether you can explain it clearly
• Consolidate and clarify: typically, I find that a handful of key shifts provide the focus or kernel of the strategy. With these in place, most other elements of what needs to change will flow

It really is worth spending time and effort getting clear on your strategy. It creates the insight, focus and direction your organisation needs to thrive in our changing world. It gives you the confidence to walk into the boardroom or staff briefing and say, “This is where we are going. This is what needs to change. And this is how we’re going to do it”. Leading in this way, with passion, conviction and clarity will greatly increase your chances of success.

It’s said that calm seas don’t make good sailors. If it’s plain sailing, if the wind is behind you, if the business is rolling in then that’s fantastic. But you need challenges and tough times to develop the resilience and strength to thrive in the new economic climate we are heading into – a climate in which uncertainty and change are the most certain challenges that businesses will face.

This is the first shift that all aspiring leaders must make: to embrace and enjoy being uncomfortable.

Here are five warning signals that you need to make this first shift:

1 – You find your work boring and frequently think about doing something different

2 – You want to get promoted but it’s not happening fast enough

3 – People don’t listen to you or your ideas, so you stop putting so many forward

4 – You secretly think there isn’t a cat in hell’s chance you’re going to hit those stretch targets so you aim for what you know will be acceptable

5 – You feel like you’re pushing at closed doors or a glass ceiling and you’re not sure you’ve got the energy to break through

These red flags. Indications that you need to push yourself way beyond what you’ve ever done before. And here are four things that you can do to step up and start playing in that rare air that the people above you are already enjoying:

1 – Ask to get on the biggest problems that your company faces. There are no excuses here: you’ve got to find ways to get on those critical projects that will shape you and the company you work for. This will stretch and challenge you and enable you to earn the respect, kudos and dare I say it, bragging rights, which come with having cracked the toughest problems and challenges in your field.

I’ve always been amazed at what happens when people simply ask for the opportunity. Think about it! Your bosses want to succeed and if you’re offering a way for them to do so then, provided you are great at what you do, they will usually find a way for you to help them.

2 – Delegate even more, and do so effectively. One of the common reasons I find mid ranking managers and executives struggle to step up to the next level is that they simply fail to delegate, or worse, they delegate badly – without support and accountability. Great delegation is something would be leaders should have learned in their 20s and early 30s, but so many didn’t and that’s a common reason they struggle to rise to the top later in their careers.

So if there is an ounce of this characteristic in you then ponder on this: there are plenty people beneath you that want to succeed. So let them. Give them some of your challenges and make sure they have the support they need to succeed. Lead as you would be led. In this way, you will create time and space to tackle the bigger challenges that will mark you and your business out against the competition.

3 – Face your fears head on and turn them into strengths. I know it’s easy to say, but you’ve got to turn the challenges you’re facing into opportunities. You’ve got to turn your fear around and say “I’m going to do things differently. I’m going to show you how we can bust through these challenges. I’m going to show everyone just how great we can be.”

And most importantly, you must…

4 – …Engage your heart! Life is too short for drudgery so don’t be the richest person in the graveyard. Push yourself, get engaged in things that you really feel passionate about and engage your heart. That is what’s going to give you the edge. That’s what’s going to enable you to embrace being uncomfortable and push yourself to the next level.