Most of the people on earth have to work at some point in their lives. And for most of us, work takes up a significant amount of time and it impacts how we are able to enjoy our evenings, weekends and even time away from work. When work is going well, often life is easier. And when work is not going well, whole families can feel the impact.​
Much of “work going well” relies on leaders. It relies on leaders to recruit the right people; to onboard and train people well; to give people meaningful goals and support their people’s growth throughout the year; to fairly appraise them at the end of the year and allocate bonuses; and to be in relationship with people so that they can walk side by side as the challenges of life and work present themselves. It’s a lot to ask of a leader. On top of their own work. And yet, when this is not in place, then work gets hard, people get stressed and sick, and life and business suffers.
As teams get larger and more complex, the people aspect is really crucial; working out how to ensure the right people in the teams, as a leader to motivate, support and most importantly how to delegate.
I have deep values about what it means to be a leader and how leaders must grow themselves to be able to face any situation that leadership invites. A conversation about performance, about emotion, about success, about grief, about failure, about jealousy, about ambition etc. Leaders must be equipped to deal with all of these things as this is what our people bring to work every day. I once heard a leader say “there is no place for emotions in my team”... and so what happens then? How do people come to work when life throws challenges their way? As a cut-down version of themselves? Or how about the leader learns to be with difficult emotions and no-one has to pretend.
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My work at bco is in support of leaders being able to lead and to face the awesome responsibility of leading business to thrive and supporting and growing their people through deep relationship to thrive as well.