Achieving the Personal Freedom to Lead

There are many forces and tendencies competing in the business world that directly impact the effectiveness of every leader trying to set (or understand) strategy while executing that strategy through people. The team, the district, the region, the division, the business unit, the organization, customers, competitors, government, family, friends, and the digital social network all contend for attention in the mind and heart of a leader. And in this complexity, nothing is clear, and nothing is easy. The leader, no matter if a first-time leader or the Chief Executive Officer of a Global 5,000 company, is faced with the same challenges of having multiple affiliations and a lack of ability to make choices independent of the cascading pressures of multiple stakeholders. For these many reasons, leadership autonomy has been taken away from leaders and has been replaced by “safe” decision making and the constant mind-numbing managing to the needs of multiple stakeholders all who threaten quietly or overtly to negatively impact the leader when things go astray which often will happen. If you haven’t picked up on it yet, when you hear the magic words, “someone needs to be accountable for this,” that means some leader someplace is going to be given some very negative feedback.

As a result, it feels that leaders are forced to make water-downed decisions that at the end of the day satisfy no one and leave customers wondering about the value proposition being offered.

In a recent leadership development session I was facilitating, one of our participants talked rather glumly about the state of his role as a leader and how he has no joy or personal freedom in decision making. I like to think of myself as a very positive person, but I must share that I found that conversation to be extremely depressing and I found it difficult coming up with a way out.  The participant spilled his guts out telling stories of how his manager is afraid of her manager and her manger is afraid of the line manager and how they are all afraid to spend any money to invest in new innovative products which is their overarching business strategy.

We processed the conversation for a while and ultimately (and in a very positive way) came up with three ideas to work on in an effort to achieve the personal freedom needed to lead effectively.

What is Personal Freedom to Leader?

Before we started brainstorming, we wanted to define what we were trying to solve for. We determined Personal Freedom to Lead was a leadership mindset where a leader has the skills, tools, knowledge, and total confidence to make decisions and live with the outcomes of those decisions even if it costs them their job.

Three Things to Achieve Personal Freedom to Lead

Every business is in business to deliver a value proposition to customers who are willing to pay for that value because the perceived benefits of that value is significantly greater that the costs to acquire that value.  Your job as a leader is to believe in and support the delivery of that unique value to your select customers no matter what. Every decision you make, every conversation you have, and every dollar you spend from your budget should be done with that customer value proposition in mind.

If you are confident, use it to your advantage.  If you have done the work to find the answers and have developed a unique point of view that you know will work, then be big and bold in leadership. Leveraging your confidence will become contagious and lead to others being more confident. But confidence is also scary to those who don’t have it. People without confidence will do everything in their power to diffuse your confidence even if it means hurting their won careers and the business.

This is the hardest one and, in many instances, only comes with experience (but not necessarily age). This is where you get to a certain point in life where you’ve developed the expertise and you know exactly what to do and how to do it. And you don’t care what other people think.  It’s that magical moment leaders dream of when you are able to do what you believe in and know what works while not caring what others think and how every faction is going to react because you are ready, willing, and able to walk away. I realize that number three is not for every leader, but trust me, when and if you get there…you will have achieved personal freedom to lead. And that is a wonderful thing.