People tend to want to follow the beaten path. The difficulty is that the beaten path doesn't seem to be leading anywhere.
— Charles Mathias, Author
VIM Executive Coaching has never believed in blindly following the approach to executive leadership. When others were pushing “one-minute approaches” or a “7-Quick-Step Solutions” or other easy fixes, we were hesitant to push easy answers, smiley podcasts or podium-pounding speechifying.
We have committed ourselves to teaching executives mindfulness, greater authenticity and to develop responses to work place challenges over impulsive reaction.
Executive leadership cannot be reduced to hashtags.
For those who may not be following, the hashtag (#), the Oxford dictionary describes the social media device as: “a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media sites and applications, especially Twitter, to identify digital content on a specific topic.”
In the social media world, the hashtag is the equivalent of following the crowd. We are certain that if we applied a hashtag to executive leadership, we would get all sorts of easy advice, courses, seminars and public speakers.
As to who invented the hashtag, we have no idea. For many decades, the underused symbol came to signify a number e.g. #3, before a software genius thought, “Hey, no one is using this symbol, why don’t I develop a shorthand software why of saying, ‘follow the crowd?’” It enabled minor celebrities to become social media influencers to shill lipstick or a baseball team or arthritis crème. The end result, these years later, was to rally a bunch of crowd followers around a product or service or personality.
Is that what we want?
Effective mindfulness is the opposite of a hashtag. While some love the concept of following a crowd, building a head-nodding consensus, not making waves, etc. The wise executive leader and their team members learn to respond; to take a deep breath and to determine the best course of action.
A mindful team, by the way, is not a group of contrarians, rather a group of individuals who weigh and measure the best course of action before plunging themselves into an abyss. The mindful team celebrates authenticity. The mindful team respects a diversity of opinion and of understanding that the best solutions are often solutions that are arrived at because there is mutual deference.
The hashtag way of thinking is the opposite. When leaders are blindly followed, it invariably leads to poor outcomes, worse advice and questionable outcomes. VIM Executive Coaching teaches authenticity and mindfulness, not outcomes. Mindfulness through authenticity asks that the team and its leader work in an atmosphere of what is real and valid.
In a silly example perhaps, social media influencers (“Famous for being famous”) might work for a cosmetics company pushing a ridiculously expensive lip gloss on pre-teens, hashtags and all, when a product one-third the price – and every bit as good is available in any department store. People may love the hashtag, but that doesn’t always mean the hashtag will love them back!
In a similar fashion, every executive is unique and can be effective – introvert or extrovert, young or old, and on and on when they operate out of mindfulness and authenticity.
Effective executive leadership must strive to not convince itself that following the crowd, conforming to the crowd, is the only solution to solving a problem. It is a delightful solution to solving an age-old problem, the problem of blindly following when a measured approach could have averted bad decisions.