18 Who Can Help Me Lead?

Susan never saw her leadership as a solo adventure. From the start, Susan had instead seen her leader’s role as drawing on a broad support team. Susan knew that she didn’t have the stamina, insight, experience, and other wherewithal to lead on her own. And that self-knowledge turned out to be Susan’s leadership gift. She never tried to do everything all on her own. She never assumed that leadership was all on her shoulders. With every leadership twist and turn, Susan would reach out to just the right members of her large support team, to help her carry the burden. As a result, Susan never felt the full impact of her leadership challenges, which instead quickly rippled out through the healthy filter of her support team. 

Help

Leadership can be lonely. Don’t let it be unduly so. Don’t take your leadership role as if it’s all up to you alone. Your leadership will suffer if you do. Instead, find and value others to help you lead. Build a personal team around you of family, friends, and advisors on whom you can rely for various aspects of support. You may have more needs as a leader than you anticipate. Those needs may be for sound advice, frank corrections when you’re wrong, warnings when your leadership is wandering astray, reminders about your mental and physical health, a shoulder on which to cry, a confidante to whom to complain, or someone to explain something technical you don’t understand. At various times, you may need a mentor, friend, or acquaintance who can serve as a prophet, visionary, psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor, spiritual advisor, healer, comforter, whisperer, or admonisher. You may need an intervention, restoration, reprieve, or celebration. You need a circle of valued and trusted individuals around you in order for you to effectively lead. Consider the following candidates, as you build your leadership-support team. 

Predecessor

Depending on how you gained leadership, and whom you followed in your leadership role, your predecessor in leadership may be your biggest potential supporter. From experience alone, your predecessor likely knows more about leading your organization than anyone else, perhaps including you depending on how long you’ve already served. If your predecessor retired or left on other good terms, then your predecessor may be available to you for periodic consultation or an even bigger role, such as for fundraising or as a task-force leader or member on special projects. For your benefit and the predecessor’s benefit, your predecessor may need a period away before serving as your supporter. But don’t miss the opportunity to lean on your predecessor, who would know where the buried skeletons are. Organizational history can explain a lot, and your predecessor likely knows the relevant history. Consult your predecessor when conditions and obstacles emerge that you cannot readily navigate or explain. Your predecessor may know their genesis and may have recommendations for their prompt resolution. 

Team

The leadership team you build around you, as already addressed in a prior chapter, should be your biggest supporter. You will have selected your leadership team members for their ability to support your leadership initiatives. Yet your leadership team members will have operational duties. Given their ongoing responsibilities within the organization, they may not be able to simultaneously serve as your independent counselors, advisors, and supporters. Your leadership team members have things to get done for which they need your guidance and resources. You have working and supervisor relationships with your leadership team members that may keep them from serving effectively as your supporters and advisors for your special leadership needs. Rely on your leadership team members for your leadership support. But don’t hesitate to build a broader support team outside of your designated organizational leaders. 

Mentors

Leaders, especially those who are in their first significant leadership role, can benefit from mentors. A mentor is an experienced, successful, independent individual in whom a leader can confide for a sympathetic listening ear, sage advice, and emotional support. A mentor’s insight may not be operational as much as psychological, spiritual, personal, and emotional. A mentor won’t necessarily help a leader solve organizational problems but may instead help the leader countenance them, embody them, and grow or even transform because of them. A mentor isn’t so much interested in helping a leader address issues as instead to grow because of them. A mentor can help a leader become more aware of the multiple layers of symbolic meaning that issues carry and convey, beneath their surface, that can lead to transformative leadership. While senior board members and retired leaders can be effective mentors, you may need to go well outside your organization to find a suitable listener and guide. You may find helpful mentors among professional and trade association officers and board members, and senior alumni or experienced adjunct faculty at your alma mater or another nearby college or university. 

Advisors

A leader may also seek out and rely on advisors who have special skill and experience on certain issues or functions. Your organization may have fully competent staff members to address operational issues, on whom you regularly and appropriately rely. Yet your leadership may benefit from having special expertise on operational or strategic issues that you believe you need to address and improve. You might, for instance, retain a technology, communications, graphics, engineering, benefits, facilities, or artificial intelligence advisor regarding the latest developments in those fields. Advisors and consultants can make a leader look smart, bringing the leader’s knowledge forward toward the cutting edge. Beware the allure of expertise, though. Don’t let consultants and advisors mislead you into thinking, approaches, and ventures that do not align with your organization’s mission, vision points, and needs. Make your own strategic judgments. But do so informed by consultants and advisors as necessary, to keep your organization on the cutting edge. 

Confidantes

A leader can also benefit from having confidantes. A confidante is a person in whom the leader may confide, who will not share the leader’s disclosures with anyone. A confidante may know little or nothing of the organization’s matters. The confidante may indeed come from outside the organization. The confidante’s role isn’t to give the leader any particular advice on the matters the leader decides to disclose. The confidante’s role is instead to listen to whatever the leader discloses, preferably nonjudgmentally, although a confidante is well within the role to give the leader warnings. The confidante’s warning may be what the leader seeks. The leader just needs to tell someone else what’s going on, as in can you believe it? To have the confidante listen, hear the disclosure, and believe that what the leader has shared has actually occurred may be enough. Sometimes, a leader just needs someone else to hear the extraordinary things that can go on around leadership. The confidante must be someone whom the leader can trust neither to disclose the confidences nor to otherwise act, except as the leader requests. If you need someone simply to hear what’s going on, without necessarily reacting, then find a suitable confidante. 

Spouse

A married leader has a natural confidante in the leader’s spouse. Not every spouse makes an appropriate confidante. Some spouses have a role or relationship, or burdens and limitations of their own, that would make a leader’s confidential disclosure to the spouse inappropriate.  But whether the leader’s spouse is a suitable confidante or not, a spouse can still serve in a vital support role. Support, of course, goes both ways in a marriage. The leader may be supporting the spouse financially, emotionally, and in other ways, just as the spouse supports the leader. But a spouse can also serve to guide and counsel the leader on the personal impact of leadership, including work-life balance and mental, emotional, physical, and relational health. A spouse sees and feels the personal impact of leadership. No one else can better guide a leader in assessing that impact. A spouse can also be a strong encouragement and effective strategic guide. Even when the spouse has no skill or experience in leadership, the spouse may be able to intuit the leader’s leanings better than the leader intuits the leader’s own. Consider treating your spouse as the core member of your support team.

Family

Other family members, beyond the leader’s spouse, can also serve in support roles of a different kind. Children, parents, siblings, and other family members are not leadership advisors. Don’t try to make them so. Yet leadership can be so intense and demanding that a leader needs a counterweight to the experience. Family can provide that counterweight. Family members may accept you for who you are, not what you do as a leader. Your leadership successes won’t necessarily impress them, just as your leadership failures won’t cause them to think any less of you. The unquestioned acceptance of family members, including their unconditional love, simple care, and constant presence, may be all you need to withstand the personal challenges of leadership. You don’t have to speak of your leadership challenges when in your family members’ presence. You and they may both do better if you don’t. But whether they know of your leadership wins and losses or not, they’ll still know you and how you are doing as their family member. Keep up your family relationships when serving as a leader. Consider your family members to be part of your support team, just as you are part of their support, too. 

Friends

Friends can serve as helpful members of your support team, in their own peculiar role. Friends, of course, generally have nothing to do with your vocation, not even with your leadership. If you attract individuals because you are a leader, those individuals may not be your genuine friends. Long-time friends, those whom you knew before you became a leader, can keep your head on straight when leadership wants to twist it around or swell it up. Friends, much like family members, tend to treat you for who you are more so than what you’ve done for them lately. And when in leadership, you can benefit from having others around you who aren’t looking toward your influence, authority, or accomplishments. You may share some of your leadership experience with your friends. Friends can discuss work challenges at times. Your friends may help you gain insight not so much on your leadership issues but on your strengths and weaknesses that may play into those issues. Friends can reveal to you what you don’t immediately recognize about yourself. Keep your friends close as you proceed in leadership. And remain a good friend to them.

Professionals

Leaders can also benefit from having support professionals on their team. Executive support is a profession. Psychologists, therapists, counselors, leadership coaches, life coaches, pastors, and priests can all provide a leader with insight, reassurance, comfort, and other kinds of mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual support to meet leadership challenges. While support professionals may just supply a bit of help here and there, in crisis or other critical situations, a longer-term special relationship with one of these professionals can trigger a personal transformation and, with it, a transformation in leadership. Support professionals can help a struggling leader get past the surface issues to the deeper levels at which the leader must work to discover the awareness necessary to navigate leadership effectively. Your leadership challenges may not be tactical. They may not even be strategic. Your leadership challenges may instead be deep within your own soul and psyche, where you’ll find the authentic self capable of steering your organization toward its own transformation. Seek support professionals who can work with you on those deeper transformative levels.  

Reflection

Do you have a strong support team around you, outside of your leadership team within the organization? Who are the members of your support team, and how do their roles differ? Is your support team missing one or more of the roles this chapter describes, including predecessors, mentors, advisors, confidantes, family members, friends, and professionals? Should you be seeking to add one or more of those roles to your support team? Who would be your ideal mentor, if you could choose characteristics? Can you think of someone available to you who has some of those characteristics? Do you need to retain a consultant or advisor on a special leadership issue? Is the individual in whom you confide trustworthy to keep your confidences? Are you involving your spouse to the right degree in helping you manage your work-life balance and monitor your health while leading? Are you spending quality time with family members, as a healthy counterweight to your leadership investment? Would you benefit from adding a support professional to your team?

Key Points

• Don’t treat yourself as alone in leadership but instead seek support.

• Your predecessor in leadership may be an appropriate supporter.

• Your leadership team plays an operational, not a support role.

• Value the insight of a wise and experienced leadership mentor.

• Seek consultants and advisors on specific technical leadership issues.

• A trustworthy confidante can serve a valuable support role.

• Your spouse can help you maintain a work-life balance and health.

• Your family members provide a healthy counterweight to leadership.

• Friends can remind you of your character apart from leadership.

• Support professionals can play key roles in leadership transformation.

Read Chapter 19.