Are you consciously creating your role or filling it?
Often we find ourselves out of balance in work. Maybe we are overworked, underworked or squeezed by the pressure of back-to-back Zoom calls.
This feeling of pressure is not a productive, happy sustainable place to be. This is not where we are at our most creative, supportive or genius.
Disconcertingly, when we find ourselves in these situations, it can feel impossible to move the conversation and our thinking into a space where we can create a resolution that is useful to us as humans, leaders, our colleagues and our organisations.
However, if we want to grow as leaders, create successful organisations and live in jobs that we love, then finding sustainable and scalable, win-win resolutions is exactly our challenge.
While this discomfort might be sitting with you, it might not actually belong to you. Tensions like these are often systemic in nature and are best resolved at the level of the system.
In this case, it is the role that is sick, NOT you!
One way to look at this is that, the sickness of the role that you are occupying is symptom or an underlying system issue, so a little detachment could be useful. For example, you could try to imagine yourself and your colleagues as the doctors treating a sick patient. You do not need rescuing, the role and the system it is part of, need healing and leadership is owning this or even just opening the dialogue and raising awareness.
How might you do that?
To start with, I would invite you to imagine yourself observing the “role” within its place in the organisation, from the position of a 3rd party looking in.
- What do you notice?
- What would the role say, if it could speak?
- Where is it under-resourced?
- Where does it give too much?
- What is the essential truth of the space that the role sits in?
- Who or what is the role not able to say “Yes” to?
You might then like to consider, what could this role look like when it is healthy, occupied by someone who loves it and is creating great results for the organisation?
- What is its core purpose?
- How does it decide what work to do?
- Who does it engage with?
- What kind of conversations does it have?
- What are the principles and models that will set it up for success?
- Where does it set boundaries?
You could try this alone or directly with your colleagues, either way sharing this level of fresh understanding with others can be a key enabler if their behaviour can impact and support your situation.
If you agree on what ‘good’ looks like and what ‘now’ looks like, you can start to work together to devise experiments to create the conditions where this role, and its occupier can flourish and make strategic changes to create your desired reality. Alternatively, you might now reach an impasse and consider the idea together that this role is actually not the one for you. This is good information too. It is better to know so that you can start to create the life that will bring you energy.
In doing this, I would also invite you to take some time for reflection, to see what repeating patterns of your behaviour you see in this situation. Are there areas of your life where you end up with similar feelings? When did you first notice these?
Take a few minutes, see if you can drift back to identifying the belief or perception that might have contributed to you either creating or being attracted to this situation. Maybe you will notice something deeper, maybe you won’t. It’s all good.
…and if you would like to discuss any of these thoughts or feeling with a little leadership coaching support, drop me a line.