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I love working with leaders at any stage of their personal or professional journey. Every leader I coach is completely unique and yet there are many shared issues to contend with. I’ve recently developed a simple model, intending to help individuals identify where they are now with regards to leadership and where they want to be. I’ve called it the Developing Leadership Grid.
I’d like to explain how it works and ask where you think you currently sit.
The journey
None of us ever stand still in life, least of all in our careers. We are continually presented with challenges and experiences which will test us to varying degrees. The outcomes, in terms of what we do and how that feels, will shape who we are and how we show up next time we come across the same challenge.
It’s this that makes us all move around the Developing Leader Grid.
What’s it all about?
First of all, this isn’t a theory: this grid was derived from the conversations I have with, and the overlapping issues between, many of my clients.
It simply takes an individual’s confidence and plots it against their professional performance. The latter is not just about their external results and the opinions of their peers, but also how they feel they are performing and whether their experience is equipping them for real-life scenarios. Confidence can also be just as much about perception as reality.
On the grid, the bottom of the vertical axis (professional performance) is low and the top is high and the confidence (horizontal) axis works the same way but with low on the left and high on the right.
The two axes create four quadrants.
- Bottom left is low confidence, low professional performance and known as the “That’s not me” leader;
- Bottom right is high confidence, low professional performance and known as the “Mind the Gap” leader;
- Top right is low confidence, high professional performance and known as the “Making it up” leader; and
- Top right is where we are all aiming to be: high confidence and high professional performance and known as the “True to myself” leader.
Finally, It doesn’t matter what field they lead in – they could be operational, financial or HR and work in anything from retail to construction.
The “That’s not me” Leader
Ranking low in confidence and professional performance, this leader is not in a natural or comfortable place.
Leaders who fall into this quadrant on the developing leader grid are feeling exhausted and exasperated. They have a significant lack of belief and are stuck.
Oddly, by understanding this, these leaders are likely to be in a good position to learn and evolve. They recognise their own lack of experience and know they have a confidence issue. Therefore, once given some guidance and a chance to talk things through, they will be likely to learn quickly.
In my mind, everyone is a leader is some way, so this position is probably false, or at least exacerbated by the emotional mind, as opposed to being something they’ve been told as formal feedback. It has probably come about because this individual has been thrust into a leadership position, so they don’t identify with being a part of this population. For them, leadership is obvious: it’s the captain of a netball team or a Head Boy or Girl. It’s about visibly leading a large number of people and their day job is not about this.
In reality, this person could be the receptionist or office manager who has become a ‘go to’ person because of their knowledge and connectivity within the business. They just won’t recognise this as a form of leadership and will devalue this part of their role.
My typical client in this area is one who has been promoted to a leadership position quickly. They are in a constant state of denial and believe they have been over-promoted, despite feedback to the contrary. Coaching this client involves sharing tools and techniques on influencing, having difficult conversations, and managing their own mindset in order to shore up their confidence. I will also work with them to seek out evidence that they are doing a good job so that we can use it to counteract their lack of confidence.
The “Making It Up” Leader
In contrast, this leader is experiencing a tension between their professional performance, which is high, and their confidence, which remains low.
Impostor syndrome can feature highly here, with leaders in this quadrant feeling as though they’re making it up as they go along. They are constantly doubting themselves and perhaps waiting for a fall. They don’t feel they deserve to be in this role and yet external validation is there and feedback is positive.
Although they don’t struggle to make decisions or to understand situations, their lack of confidence comes from not knowing how to tell whether they’ve done the right thing.
These leaders expect to drop into the “I’m not a leader” quadrant because their subconscious is telling them they are a fraud. They will likely have progresses quickly through their career and will have a niggling doubt that they don’t work hard or smart enough to be classified a leader. Linking tangible hours with seniority means can mean they experience burnout, and, despite positive feedback, their lack of belief means they hold out for the ‘but’; the development point that reinforces their opinion that they’re not quite there yet.
For me, this presents itself as a client who is doing well professionally but feels they aren’t doing enough. They have a strong desire to please others which is overshadowing their ability to focus on the right things (which, in turn, will build their confidence). We will focus our coaching time on shedding some limiting beliefs, one of which is that their colleagues are somehow further up the hierarchy than them. They need to see they are on an equal footing, which means disproving the last of that impostor syndrome. It’s important to address this because they often feel highly overwhelmed and are wondering whether they should just quit and get an easier/less senior role.
The “Mind The Gap” Leader
These leaders understand the concept and the end results they require but they find themselves not being able to deliver. “If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got”, well, that’s exactly what’s tripping this individual up. They believe in themselves and they intellectually understand what’s required, but the moment it comes to doing it, the unconscious behaviours kick in.
They are a contradiction: they could tell you everything they should be doing to be a successful leader but they can find themselves kicking themselves and being fixated on the bits they aren’t doing. It may be a lack of tools or experiences. In contrast, it may simply be the successful habits (up until now) are so ingrained they are difficult to change.
The Mind The Gap leader will often indulge in ‘unconscious acting’. In other words, they will look back on actions they took and kick themselves for doing it wrong. I often use the phrase ‘watering the weeds not the roses’. Their focus on the negative makes those negatives feel bigger and stronger than any of the positives.
An example client would be one who worries about what others in the organisation think they are capable of. Their perception of the business is now dictating how they show up as a leader. We may work together to get accurate and timely feedback and use this to pick a small number of areas to explore during coaching. Or, the individual maybe really clear on what they want to work on, and they want a coaching to work out what they actually will commit to do differently and then to be held accountable to those commitments.
The “True to Myself” Leader
This leader occupies the top, right-hand quadrant of the developing leader grid. They are high on confidence and high on professional performance. They are experienced and willing to do the right thing, whether it feels comfortable or not. Ultimately, all leaders need to arrive here in order to truly succeed in their roles.
They enjoy their job and feel able to analyse their performance with a view to always learning. Being true to yourself is all about having the courage to make difficult decisions and to assess situations objectively, not emotionally.
Coaching brings many people to this rewarding place. One I particularly remember was the director of a social care organisation who moved from bottom left to top right over the course of just a year. I helped them understand their true leadership identity and purpose and navigate challenges while retaining their values. Refusing to compromise in this way isn’t easy but doing it is incredibly empowering. Once they had experienced it, they were able to repeat this approach and feel comfortable in doing so.
You may think that once you’re here coaching isn’t needed. In some cases that’s totally true, but I do have some clients who are in this quadrant. What do we work on? Smaller obstacles or challenges that the individual feels is getting in their way to being even more successful or they often ask me to partner with them so that objectively I can help spot when their might be a limiting belief, or a behaviour that they are building as a habit that might not be the best choice.
Of course, a journey is rarely linear. Many leaders may feel they spend time in and out of each of the four quadrants and that’s to be expected. The aim is to recognise where they are and pull the right levers, or explore the correct behaviours, to move themselves towards their end goal of leading while being true to themselves.
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