In ninth grade I was voted to serve as president of my freshman class. I was excited for the chance to lead and excited to enter high school. For our school, the first task of each year was to plan a class retreat as a kickoff event. I had all kinds of ideas for it. I also had a budget, a very lean budget, but I wasn’t going to get hung up on limits where there was much fun to be had. During the planning process I told our faculty advisor how much it meant to us that we had the freedom to lead as we saw fit. I was full of confidence and foolishness at fifteen, not knowing the difference between the two as tends to happen at that age. Our advisor honored that desire, allowing us to pass or fail based on our own merit. I was determined not to fail so I set to work. By the end of the planning, I felt we had a pretty good program for the class to enjoy. Then the retreat date arrived, and the plan was executed.
By the end of the retreat I was looking for a place to hide.
Many of my classmates complained about the accommodations. It was an overnight retreat, and we decided to hold a “lock-in” on the school grounds. My class didn’t like that. Other classes got to spend the night at youth campgrounds and much nicer church facilities. The food was provided by parents, which didn’t go over too well with everyone. While other classes had pizza parties, we had stale chips and soggy subs. I am very much a dreamer, a big-picture person, and I can tend to overlook key details. When it came time for the games, I had forgotten to include volunteers to help things run smoothly, so instead of playing the games with our classmates, the other members of student council and I had to check lists and keep track of the rules. There were several other details that I missed during the whole retreat. My team of co-leaders was not happy with me. They let me know it and by that point I was about ready to just sit down and cry.
After the event, my advisor asked me how I thought it went. I told him it didn’t go how I had envisioned it. I was trying to make too many people happy, which resulted in no one being happy, and I was left feeling terrible and hearing the complaints from my classmates. I learned a profound lesson through that experience:
Leadership is an emotional process.
Some of us are more comfortable accepting that reality than others, but it is true all the same. Whether we embrace the emotions of our experience or try to place them off to the side, our role as leaders is to understand how our emotions are at work in the situations that require our involvement.
As we kick off a new year, we took time in our Next Gen Leaders group at the Conway Center for Family Business to examine some tools to help us better understand our leadership abilities. Before our session together we completed a DiSC profile and a personality test on 16personalities.com, which uses the Myers-Briggs format. We brought our results with us and then walked through some scenarios that we commonly navigate as leaders within the family business.
For example, we started with a few key questions to think specifically about our role within the family business, such as “What aspects of my role bring me the most joy?” and “Which aspects of my role cause me the most anxiety?” These questions help us to identify our strengths and our growth edges. Examining them through the lens of our DiSC profile and our understanding of our personality type can add insights into why we thrive in certain situations and struggle in others. From there, we talked about specific scenarios – things like difficult conversations, confronting family members, having to complete tasks that are outside of our comfort zone, and juggling different departments as we learn the ropes.
What the exercise revealed is that leadership is, indeed, an emotional process. Certain personality types and leadership styles lean into embracing emotion, using their perception and intuition to guide them through relationships and decision making. Other personality types and leadership styles tend more toward quantifying and measuring emotion to focus on tasks and how to steer the direction of the present transaction. While there can be, at times, overlap in how we lead, we tend either to lead with emotion or to lead by putting it aside. Discussing these scenarios as well as our experiences and the emotions around them was a valuable exercise.
If I had known more about my leadership abilities and my areas for growth when I was fifteen, I could have saved my class, and my co-leaders, a miserable experience on our class retreat. Knowing that I was a big-picture guy would have allowed for someone with analytical and organization skills to take over and excel at making the activities fun for everyone. Giving the budget to a leader who loves crunching numbers would have provided a chance to find better alternatives for food and lodging. In my excitement and my desire to come through, I didn’t know how to pay attention to how my emotions were affecting my decision making.
Tools like the DiSC and Myers-Briggs based assessments help us to see how our strengths as a leader can be better understood. It’s important that we take the time to know ourselves and to grow in self-awareness. The more we understand our strengths and our growth edges the better we can plan for success by continuing to rely on our strengths while being aware of where we need our team to fill in the gaps in the areas they excel.
Mike O’Donnell
Executive Coach
Leadership Consultant
Integrated Leadership Systems
If you are a next generation family business member who is interested in topics that address leadership roles in your family-owned business, please join us at these Next Gen Leaders monthly sessions. Contact Amy at adotts@familybusinesscenter if you have any questions about this group.