Deborah Harris FCA 💃🏿💃🏿

A growing trend seen amongst very high achieving professionals in leadership roles is the use of executive counselling. This is beyond the coaching and mentoring usually promoted as useful for career growth. This form of counselling speaks more to the issues and challenges that keep you up at night, the drivers that underpin continued success and the factors that can often lead to burnout. Personally I feel friends and family are too close and have a bias towards your wellbeing and shouldn’t be relied on to have the work-related difficult conversations.

Trust is one of the outcomes from a team that is psychologically safe. The ability to be open, vulnerable, and working in an environment of trust is not an elusive or magic formula. Having a sense of being included, being safe to learn and make mistakes, to bring authentic experiences and ideas and have them valued, plus knowing you are safe to challenge without it turning into a career limiting incident all build the trust in a team.

For certain groups, even if you stay professional you may face unconscious bias in the form of your boss feeding into and responding to the worst stereotypes. As well as remaining professional it is importantly to ask questions to ensure you are both on the same page and you’re successfully navigating and bias they may be working under

These solutions immediately jump into defining tasks that are outstanding etc. The delays may be people related. In these cases part of the date to be collected includes an audit of the current out post bottlenecks. This isn’t to apportion blame, merely an attempt to identify what has caused the delay in delivery to date and the most likely sources of delay going forwards. Framing the outstanding tasks in this way has a much better chance of creating a remedial Workplan than ignoring the human element.

Remote working is fabulous. Your authentic, whole self is safe, at home as you communicate online. But remote comms has drawbacks. In-person should still be part of your arsenal, it's critical. A BBC Hybrid article warned "there’s a 'genuine risk' that attitudes (like out of sight out of mind) towards remote office employees will amplify pre-existing biases" eg linked to race, disability or sex. Pre COVID19, women with caring responsibilities, for example, would request flexible/ remote working so are "...therefore likely to be disproportionately affected if companies prioritise retaining or promoting office based staff." So don't forget in person comms: that in-person coffee / chat/ lunchtime meetup might just save your job.

However, high emotions or unconscious bias that isn’t acknowledged can cloud judgment and hinder decision-making. Emotions might cause resistance to change or an overreaction to perceived threats, while unconscious bias can lead to favoritism or overlooking critical insights. The importance of active questioning, and listening is critical for success. As you create a safe space for honest dialogue, you help uncover and work through bias and manage the emotional response. Ultimately, as Steven Covey Jr advised, the aim is to get clarity, reduce miscommunication, and most importantly build trust, the basis for inspiring teams to do great work. This ultimately enhances strategic decisions, making the likelihood of success possible.