Have you ever felt like your business or job just wasn’t fun anymore? Like somehow, it had turned into means to pay the bills, not an outlet for your deeply felt passions. I can sure relate. It’s one of the top 3 reasons so many of my leadership coaching clients originally asked for my help to grow and develop their companies.
I remembered few months ago having a private, one-to-one conversation with Jane. She was sharing how she had been running her company located in Kenya for close to 5 years.
“Aji, I used to love this business, but just feel burned out now. I have all the team I needed and that makes it worse as am faced with all the stress and responsibility too!”
If you’ve been in business or leading a team for a while now then I’m sure you understand exactly what she was saying.
The more we talked the clearer it became that the real challenge that Jane faced wasn’t that her business wasn’t a good one. One thing became extremely clear in our conversation – Jane knew how to run the day-to-day operations of her business, infact she had hired an expert to develop a business plan. But she didn’t know how to grow and develop her team. No one had ever told her she needed a leadership strategy to grow her business.
Every leader is aware of the value of a well-defined business strategy. Few, however, give thought to the leadership that will be required to implement strategies. Without proper leadership, even the best and boldest strategies die on the vine, their potential never realized.
Seeing how earnest she was about wanting to make the needed changes, I invited her to work with me and my team in our Leadership Coaching Program. Few months into the program, for her it was a breath new life into the business.
Here are some of the things we worked with Jane on:
- We helped her shift her mind-set from doing the day-to-day operations to focus on fewer, better areas of her business that made the biggest impact. Generally it means both determining what things to focus on, and what things to stop investing company time and money on.
- We helped her create a leadership strategy to intelligently grow her team, and develop strong internal capabilities so that she knew that things were getting down the right way and the right time. Simply having all of the positions on the organization chart filled will not produce the leadership that is required to implement strategies or other important organizational objectives. It is not just having the right number of bodies, it is what those bodies do and how they relate to one another that matters
This brings us to the third one
- We helped her create a better tactics – knowing exactly HOW to do the “what to do”. (Tactics are your concrete action steps to implement your strategy.) she now have, for the first time ever in her business life the support and accountability structure to make sure they were consistently DOING the “how” and “what”.
We simply have too much on our mental plates day-in and day-out to manage effectively. Without a quality external system for helping to manage it all, we can’t help but feel overloaded, and that contributes to a feeling of being out of sorts with the responsibilities and demands we face endlessly.
The best part for Jane was how much more passionate her business had become for her. It is vibrant, growing, and she had the internal systems, team, and controls so that it was markedly less reliant on her.
What about you? Do you own a successful business or lead a team but constantly feeling burned out?
Then I strongly encourage you to take action and learn more about our Leadership Coaching Program.
Don’t forget, my aim is to help you live a life of passion, focus and lead with extraordinary influence!