opinion

Personal safety: danger on the street

A few weeks ago I returned to London from a trip to São Paulo in Brazil. On my arrival there and on my return to the UK I was struck by the issue of personal safety: in São Paulo you’re always aware of the threat to this safety, and you take precautions as a matter of course. Pedestrians and car-drivers are mugged at a rate that British city-dwellers find shocking, cars are stolen from their owners at gunpoint, and car-drivers are held up by thieves on foot dodging in and out of the traffic. The experience of any of those situations can be traumatic.

Returning to the UK and the absence of such threat on the streets brought into sharp relief for me the relative safety of my everyday life that I usually take for granted, and helped me appreciate not having to be prepared with a contingency plan to get out of life-threatening situations each time I drive in London and its suburbs.

Unexpected hazards

However, unexpected hazards of other kinds occur in our organisations. Senior employees may be manoeuvered into positions where it is difficult to make their voices heard or where their place in the organisation may be unclear. Women in particular may find it difficult to be respected or regarded as engaged and committed, and may find themselves sidelined, under-valued and out of the loop. Working relationships may feel insecure or out of kilter.

Balance and confidence

Leaders who find themselves in positions like this may feel an existential sense of danger. For them it is almost as if they are metaphorically staring down the barrel of a gun, so threatened do they feel. Like the victim of street crime, they need to rediscover their self-confidence and re-establish their balance in order to get themselves and their careers back on track.

Tensions in career planning

For women in these circumstances, the tensions inherent in planning their careers have an extra dimension: namely, the career sacrifices they make by having a family and prioritising their families’ needs in terms of their own availability. This has nothing to do with their commitment: many part-time professionals are as committed and conscientious as full-time employees – if not more so.

Career development and resilience

These women also need to tread a knife-edge between feeling on the back foot and failing to attract as much respect and value as their full-time peers, on the one hand, and promoting their own career development, on the other. They need to develop career resilience: a flexibility in being prepared for – and handling – the unexpected, and learning from tough experiences so as to feel more resourced for the path ahead (see more on resilience in this blog). They need to convey the message that they bring added value to a team, especially a largely male and/or largely full-time team, a value which should be exploited.

Career self-protection for women leaders

In other words, just as the inhabitants of São Paulo on the street have developed self-protective strategies to keep themselves safer, women leaders need also to arm themselves with strategies for career resilience and elegant promotion of their value.

Photo by Tom Simpson via Compfight

Women, careers and personal safety

Senior women at work, especially those working part-time, may not be as safe as they would like. They need to develop career resilience: a flexibility in being prepared for – and handling - the unexpected, and learning from tough experiences so as to feel more resourced for the path ahead.

Identity and authenticity

For some people change appears unsafe because they fear they'll no longer be who they are. However, it's not behaviour or thinking patterns that define who we are. What inherently and uniquely defines ‘self’ are our deeply held (and possibly unconsciously-held) values, our natural talents, and what we need from our environments if we are to thrive. We each need to understand our true place in the various sets of relationships that comprise our lives - in other words, our systems. Constellations can help.

Resilience and transition: an intimate connection

The relevance of resilience to what can be the challenging process of transition is striking. Leaders have change imposed upon them through, for example, merger or acquisition, or they may be moving into new roles, to new organisations, new cultures, or new countries. During these transitions they need to rediscover their internal resources and call on (or build) fresh sources of resilience. The path to (re-)building resilience can be eased by written narrative and (re-)discovering purpose and meaning.

Building organisational wellbeing

A meaningful approach to organisational wellbeing will go significantly beyond tactics and process. Building and nurturing wellbeing has to be a way of being (albeit complemented by a set of actions) if it is to bring any significant results. It is part of the organisational culture – how people are with each other. Wellbeing is everyone’s issue: it is systemic.

The challenge of leadership: what’s needed now?

The recent Sadler Heath event 'What's Needed Now?' - focused on an 'exploration of listening for the right thing to do' - highlighted big themes for me in relation to the role of leadership, responsibility, dialogue, and connection with the system.

Wellbeing: a direct impact on the bottom line

Organisations with high levels of wellbeing retain their people and in many other ways too, profitability, efficiency and effectiveness increase as wellbeing increases. Positivity breeds positivity. A sense of purpose – which gives meaning to an organisation’s work and the work of its employees – is a critical factor in the building and sustaining of wellbeing.

Leading across Cultures

To work effectively with difference, the starting point is to understand and be aware of oneself: behaviours, emotions, interpretations, assumptions, and the impact of assumptions. It means taking a holistic view, being curious, and holding back from making judgments of the worth of this or that person, or from jumping to conclusions. Leaders who are culturally aware create sub-cultures of greater trust, more effective communication, healthier relationships and leadership that releases infinitely more potential.

Factors in managing the executive career

Executives who have taken their careers in hand in a holistic sense, thinking ‘whole-life’ rather than simply in terms of the next apparently logical step on the ladder, are more likely to enjoy career longevity and deliver the fullest value for themselves and their organisations. The Wittenberg Career Coaching Model weaves together multiple factors within multiple perspectives to take account of this ‘whole-life’ approach.

Your personal brand: a marketable identity

Your personal brand conveys what makes you compelling, memorable and interesting, and becomes increasingly important the more senior the roles you take on. Expressing your personal brand relates to your passions and the sources of your personal fulfilment, your values and your achievement, your strengths and your reputation, your personal vision and your thought leadership.

Leadership coaching

Leaders who embrace the process of learning and raising their levels of self-awareness, self-understanding, understanding of others and understanding of the systems and contexts they operate within stand to gain the most from leadership coaching. On their coaching journeys they learn to listen to themselves and see themselves as others see them. They become more authentic, they see more clearly what kind of leaders they want to be, and they discover how to make that happen. They learn how to respond rather than react, in a fuller awareness of the choices they make.

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