Pick a Fight

As I’ve written about before, some weeks have themes.

Clients from a broad spectrum of organizations, verticals, and roles will wrap up our session on the same note as the person who was sitting in the office just prior.

I’ll notice the clock is at time as the client squeezes the last minutes of goodness from our discussion, and stand to signal that we really, really must wrap this up. I’ll walk the client to the entryway to assist closure, offer a goodbye hug and open the door all while still deep in conversation. An engaged client, one who is working hard to internalize and integrate the solution we’ve identified in this strategy session, rarely ends the conversation without a nudge.

This last week the universal theme for our executives and senior level professionals was: ‘Pick a Fight.’

Picking a fight can be way more fun and meaningful than a school yard altercation.

Picking a fight can be about architecting white space and driving for it. It can be about articulating and defending the moral high ground, it can be about dusting off a neglected program, process or product, shining a hot spotlight on it, and insisting it needs center stage.

The key to a great, successful fight that moves your strategy forward is to pick the overlooked, undervalued or forgotten aspect in your landscape. The aspect identified must clearly align with core business *or* core leadership goals.

Once you’ve correctly identified the overlooked aspect in your work landscape (as we do, together, in our executive coaching sessions) you lash yourself to that whitespace, program, process, or product build a framework that you can socialize and evangelize. You fight like crazy for yourselves (you and your framework).

Even the most sophisticated player needs gas in the tank, a roadmap, and a goal to hit sometimes. Picking a great fight will juice up your engine and help you go.

Fights can solve a variety of senior level challenges, as agreed upon by last week’s varied client topics.

Here’s a few problems that picking a fight can solve:

1. Over Scoped. One senior leader in product was over scoped across his sprawling company where he’s worked for many years. Being over scoped meant that he wasn’t shining in any one individual area and as a high achiever, he had grown to become a mule for the company. Old reliable. Give it to Timmy, he’ll do it, and do it really well! The origin of the over scoping had multiple factors, one of which is his super agreeable nature. By picking a fight this client can move from mule to driver, claim the respect he’s earned over the years as a credible source, and begin to lay boundaries — teaching other leaders how to respect him.

2. Promotion time. A female technology leader in our practice used her wicked smart brain to climb and climb and climb across international boundaries, from one coast of the US to the other, and up a steep ladder at a famous technology company in a technical area. She’s shipping complicated, first evers to move the needle on the performance of household name product. So at promotion time she’s set right? Sad buzzer sound. Her peers and high leadership only understood that her technical mind was a thing of beauty. No one grasps that her results are due to a keen business landscape analysis. She kept those thoughts to herself due to the politics a tier above her, she worried about stepping on toes or sending the wrong signal. By staying in her 1 lane she had reached the end of the career progression road. In our session she described watching a slow motion train wreck as a weak business strategy was being assembled one and two levels above her. By picking a fight this client can raise her profile at a key point in the promotion cycle, showcase her unknown skill set: astute strategic mind, increase her value, and create that critical peer relationship with those more senior to her.

3. Culture Shift. A third leader sat on the couch holding all the pieces of his puzzle in his hands. He had really seen it all by this stage in his career and was correctly describing the total landscape and contributing factors. But there’s a reason leading during change is a studied, discussed and dissected thing. You have to gas up your vehicle and drive in the direction opposite of the herd. Its hard. Maybe most crucial of all, you need a reason to rally, hope on the far horizon. Together we identified that when the pieces of his puzzle were all fit together, he had a fight on his hands. As he began to spitball how to message, structure and lead his fight I was able to help shape the fight as one for the moral high ground, complete with uplifted messaging. Where the leader instinctually crafted messaging that underscored the negative, we were able to correctly identify the sources of love, hope and joy (that are documented to rally people to your cause, build movements and deliver results) in the business strategy and how to lean into them.

Your fight must be three things:

–Healthy: Personal boundaries, business success, culture shift to joy.
–Moral High Ground: Insisting on quality, on data, on delight.
–A Platform: A goal, a horizon to drive for, a singular mission to be known by in this quarter.

We provide leaders with a strategy workshop space with a personal, executive coach who sees and supports your leadership. Our boutique team of senior and executive level coaches are hand picked for their field tested ability to read the field, offer correct assessment, and drive outcomes.

You can learn more at lauraclose.com