Women in Financial Services
Leaders - How to get visibility right?
Katie.Dix / 09 Mar 2020
Kat Hutchings is a Leadership & Career Coach working with individuals like you to excel in your leadership role and achieve perfect-fit next career moves. Her background in Financial Services leadership roles, which means she can identify with the challenges and opportunities you face. E2W members and members of our community are invited to have a free introductory 20-minute call or meeting to explore how Kat can help you.
To enquire about Kat’s coaching programmes, please contact Katie Dix.
Leaders - How to get visibility right?
I was speaking with a client this week who holds a strong view that leaders need to be visible to their teams. He believes that leaders should be accessible, ready to support and inspire their team to create high performance.
All good points, right?
But he believes this so strongly that he’s making life difficult for himself. He’s commuting for hours every day, because he's decided that caring about the team means being physically present. This pressure isn’t coming from above, it’s coming from a standard he’s set himself.
And he’s not alone. It can be tricky for leaders to balance seeing their team face to face, on video calls or speaking by phone. And also be available to key stakeholders and for client evening events.
This is a great time of year to start with a blank slate, delete all the reoccurring invites in your calendar and start committing to meetings and locations again based on your new priorities.
When we did this together, this particular leader realised he’d be more effective working from home once every 2 weeks. He could role model a ‘Working From Home’ culture (he already encourages his team to do this but they were reluctant as he didn't set an example of it being 'ok'), needed less time to travel between meetings, saved on the commute, delegated a key monthly committee and got some headspace.
A simple amendment that he wouldn't have made if he'd stuck with his old perspective that he disliked working from home and had to be present in the office to be a visible leader.
What changed? Working out his critical few priorities and the optimal diary commitments to achieve them.
Once he was clear what he wanted to achieve, he felt differently about his visibility at the office. This is a good example of how you can change your thoughts to change how you feel and get better outcomes.
Where have you set yourself some rigid rules about how you run your diary that you could loosen to create more freedom in 2020?
Take time to re-set and hit reply to let me know what’s been deleted from your diary and how you manage visibility with your team.
P.S. As leaders we need a degree of visibility to create a high performance culture with our teams. But we may have set rules for ourselves that have become habitual. Highly effective leaders regularly review how they're spending time to maximise their impact, whether that's online or face to face.
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