Feeling lonely at the top? Time to build your Jedi council!

When we end up at the top, we feel both privileged and worried. From there we can have a major impact on the organization and people: an honor, in itself. And a huge responsibility on our shoulders too. In order to last, we need support. Not only to do the work, but to ensure sustainability both for the organization and for the leader.

Where to get that support? It feels lonely at the top, who can we trust?

Build a loyal council

Thriving Leaders ensure to have a loyal council of people around them who can

• Bring different perspectives

  We all have things we overlook yet are fundamental for sustainability.
  When we are deep in a subject, we become very involved and so close that we lose perspective, we focus on the tree and miss the forest.
  Having people external from our organization, less involved in our industry helps to gain the naïve questions and bring back perspectives to the essential and obvious we missed.

• Boost creativity

  Doing all the same brings very old same and conversion fades over time.
  Creativity gets triggered by disruption.
  When we have people from very different walks of life, they bring disruptive opinions and though it generates discomfort it also nurtures creativity if we can embrace these ideas.
  From there comes innovation, keeping a business relevant and a leader up to expectations.

• Share the burden

  People with more life experience would have gone through trials that would be new to others. Though losing a major contract or firing people is very unpleasant, people who have experienced it managed to survive. They will understand the struggle a leader is coming through and help share the emotional burden as well as find resourceful ways to settle best.
  Together we can achieve more by growing our resilience, knowing that others managed navigated through these struggles and found a positive way to handle these.

• Lighten what’s at stake

  Where we are highly dedicated to our organization, we also tend to take things very personally. Getting insights from other wise people helps to clarify what is truly at stake. Sometimes, experiences are less dramatic than we think, and we build our resilience by gaining more perspective from others.

Build quality relationships

Research on longevity has proven that the key determining factor of resilience in front of adversity, should that be professional stress, major career change, expatriation, sickness was quality relationships.

Having people around us who trust our potential and have our best interest in mind helps tremendously to boost us again in times of doubt. They help to refine the support we need and to recharge when we feel drained.

They also are the ones to challenge us and send us back on stage when the arena seems so disappointing, reminding us that to be influential we first need to be at the board table, no matter what it looks like some days.

If you do not have your Jedi council ready around you yet,
it’s urgent time to build it now!

Get a shadow Jedi

Truly enough, there are some subjects that are too confidential to share even with our Jedi council. Sometimes, people in our Jedi council know us too well and can become highly biased as well.
And in case of extreme tensions, we cannot expect our Jedi council to have the professional ability to help us handling this.

When ethics is involved as well, it is also wise to gain clarity on our own values and purpose, which the Jedi council is not meant for.

Hence, when stakes are high, when tensions grow, when confidentiality is paramount, when ethics is involved, it goes beyond our Jedi council. It is time to have a shadow Jedi at our side, also known as a a leadership coach.

Someone professional in emotional intelligence and neurosciences, someone independent, someone abiding to professional secrecy and with a strong call for ethics would be the ideal leadership coach.

Feel free to reach out to Marianne for your shadow Jedi, nobody needs to know but you!