Executive Leadership – It’s Different Now …

When I took my first job in the corporate publishing industry over twenty years ago the culture was very different to what I know from the various corporates I deliver executive leadership coaching to now. In the 90s there was still a sense of having to do your time. You most likely had to have a university degree before you worked your way up from assistant to manager and from there to director and onward (if you hadn't keeled over) to the board of the company. Normal was for that process to take decades! Super-dullsville!! Move forward to 2012 and there's a different type of leadership developing. It give less weight to who you know and what's your background and more to meritocracy, personal passion, drive and accountability. With the right education - and that doesn't have to mean university - relevant experience and, most importantly, strong personal and professional skills, leaders in corporates can achieve recognition and directorships in their late 20s and early 30s. A few (but an increasing number) are going out on their own and leading multi-million (and billion) pound operations before their thirtieth birthday. Here's an important question though: is it more impressive to be a CEO at 35 than it is at 55 years old? My answer... 'no'. Heres' what's truly impressive: any person - young, middle aged, pensioner, male, female, any culture, any socio-economic background - investing in themselves to a point where they recognise the keys of a true leader: vision, integrity, collaboration, transparency, enablement, compassion and gratitude. The most frequent challenge I see in delivering executive leadership coaching is when a leader has forgotten that their role is to serve. A product or service will only thrive when customers, clients, readers, listeners, viewers have a happy experience of it. And the company itself can only deliver that when their designers, writers, developers, marketeers, sales agents and operations directors are bought into a vision and empowered to deliver. It's always about people, it's always about evolving (an idea, a brand, a way of distributing), it's always about a mindset of adventuring and seeing new opportunities. If courage and clarity are modeled in a CEO that spirit will filter out to the directors and their management teams as will honesty, respect and ego-lessness. My 20 years ago experience was so much based around a fear & lack model too (what's in it for me) - you had to do as instructed by your manager because she was following a mandate from her director. It was like an extension of school. Today though, the most dynamic companies out there use a model of respect and abundance - CEOs acknowledging that they don't hold all the solutions but they do know how to hire creative thinkers and dynamic communicators and invest in their expansion over a given term. My greatest satisfaction in executive leadership coaching is to have a corporate decision maker remember his or her own talents, creativity and courage. To get clear once again about changes and choices; because when they're inspired they're inspiring.