Resilience, enabling others & elegant directness

Life is a collection of experiences and a journey of personal growth, and I have benefited from thinking about the elements that can guide me. These elements evolve and may change over time, but it’s an interesting exercise to spend some time on thinking what you want to anchor on in your personal development journey.

I distilled three components that apply to me right now: Resilience, enabling others and elegant directness.

Resilience and self-control

From Cicero’s writing: But it takes a brave and resolute spirit not to be disconcerted in times of difficulty or ruffled and thrown off one’s feet, as the saying is, but to keep one’s presence of mind and one’s self-possession and not to swerve from the path of reason.

Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally decisively molded their leadership.

Rooted in: Stoic teachings by Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and others. Beautifully narrated by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book Leadership in Turbulent Times

Enabling others

When you are in a management position, arguably your most important responsibility is to make sure that the people on your team are enabled to get the best out of their abilities. This means that you have to create the environment in which they can perform well, but also direct your attention and effort to areas where they need to grow. This may be on a team-wide level, to be addressed with, for example, skills training. Or on an individual level, which can be addressed by mentorship and coaching.

It’s not necessarily you who should do the mentoring. Depending on the needs there may be others in the organisation better suited. In situations where I was the mentor I have found this to be to a deeply insightful and fulfilling role. It requires you to elevate your conversations to a higher level. You have to be in full focus on the person in front of you. You have to think carefully about how to best approach the situation. These sessions can be confrontational. But if you apply curiosity — together, you want to discover the underlying causes for a certain type of behaviour — and elegant directness (see next), these conversations can be extremely valuable. Not just for the mentee, also for the mentor.

Rooted in: Experience from managing teams of high-performing individuals, mentoring, and inspired by a variety books including Robert Green’s ‘Mastery’ and Clayton Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’

Elegant directness

Combining candidness with compassion & kindness in my communication style has helped me in building strong trust-based relationships. We easily spend a third of the time that we are awake on work. Work can be demanding. It can be stressful. You need to hustle. Customers are not always angels. The work environment that is created through culture and communication patterns influences how people perform under pressure. What I believe is that teams in high-paced dynamic environments (like startups) perform better when people feel valued and respected. You can achieve this making an effort to deliver your message with clarity and compassion. I call this elegant directness.

Rooted in: Dutch culture combined with Vipassana, one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation. Vipassana means “to see things as they really are”