The #1 Skill most founders and CEOs struggle with
If you were to ask me what is the meta skill required for being a great leader, I would say the ability to have difficult conversations with people.
I’ve been doing this work for over 20 years, and I can’t tell you how many executives and founders I meet who are afraid to have conversations with their team, don’t know how to hold people accountable, or don’t know how to have healthy conflict. Most of them avoid it at all costs.
To have difficult conversations requires confidence, and it isn’t hard to start to build that confidence with smaller steps.
The first thing I tell people is that you can develop a communication style that is both direct and kind. If you’re not direct, you’re not solving the actual issue, which doesn’t help you or the other person. If you’re unkind, the other person not only feels terrible but typically starts to perform worse not better, and you feel like a jerk. No one wins.
Even if you’ve been conflict avoidant or the asshole CEO for years, you can still change your style and feel authentically like yourself. The majority of my executive coaching work is spent right here: developing a range of communication styles that work for different people and situations.
The root cause of these issues typically comes down to this: the CEO did not set (or model) clear performance expectations. When people don’t know what you’re expecting them to do, how can they meet or exceed that expectation?
When this gap between expectation and performance appears, lots of CEOs start to make some bad calls: they ignore the situation and hope it gets better, or they complain loudly about the issue to anyone who will listen, but never address the issue with the person directly. A lot of times they simply stop working with that person and bring their requests to someone else, effectively firing the person while they’re still being paid. Really!
If this sounds familiar, let’s help you get this turned around so you can start seeing the results you’re looking for in your business.