Ideally, individuals are assigned to a leadership position within an organization because they are trusted, highly competent, great with customers and know how to enlist and engage their people.

With that high level of competence comes an assumption that they don’t need much guidance or handholding.  They are big boys and girls, being paid accordingly and know what to do and simply need to be given the runway to make it happen.

What then, is the role of their boss - the CEO, President or Business Head?  Beyond that, what else would support their success?  Here are a couple of ways the leader of leaders can stay connected and provide additional support:

1.   Make Time for Monday Morning Huddles / Friday Wrap-Ups – Gather your leaders on Monday mornings to share key focus areas for the week.  This creates an opportunity for your team to report on their progress against goals and ask for help if needed.  It also gives you a chance to continually review what they see as priorities and offer course correction as needed.  It is also an efficient platform for you to share your immediate goals, offer additional guidance and direction and a bit of motivation.  Bringing the team together at the end of the week – whether in person or a 30 minute teleconference – to review progress made and align plans for the following week can be helpful to keep the team focused and engaged.

2.   Surprise them with Impromptu Check-Ins – Nothing matters more to your leaders than one-on-one time with you.  When you find yourself with an open pocket of time – reach out to one of your key leaders with a quick phone check in, meaningful e-mail or to grab a cup of coffee.  Get to know them on both a personal and professional basis – that relationship building goes a long way to building loyalty.

3.   Develop Signature Questions – What do you really want to know from your team of leaders?  What would give you the best insight into how they are doing?  Get your team used to core questions that you always want them to be prepared to answer like:

a.   What is keeping you up at night?

b.   What has you fired up and inspired at the moment?

c.    What opportunity are you most excited about?

d.   What do you see as your biggest threat to accomplishing your goals?

e.   What do you need from me?

  Superior leadership requires staying in touch and keeping the dialogue robust.

Recently I attended an event where colleagues gathered.  Time was spent catching up, swapping stories – all good.  At a certain point, however, the conversation turned sour. Suddenly the talk turned to jabs/slights/disparaging remarks about individuals who were not there.  This portion of the conversation probably only lasted about 15 minutes but it was enough to change the energy in the room from one of celebration and reunion to mean-spirited gossip.

It took me about 24 hours to fully make sense of how those 15 minutes affected me.  I very much wanted the evening to be a fun and festive gathering of people who I had not seen in awhile so I rationalized it all at first by saying that it was all in good fun, no one meant any real harm and there were elements of truth in all that was said.  The truth, however, was far from that.  Harm was done.

I remembered advice my mother gave me many years ago – which was, “if people are gossiping about others with you…you can bet they’ll do the same when you are not around.”  That rang true as I was left that evening with a feeling of being unsafe – not sure if these individuals could really be trusted with my confidences and perhaps even more significant, I wondered if I could trust what they said, how they felt, etc.  If they spoke so poorly about someone now, who they had stood by when they worked together – all bets were called of.

Not for a minute am I suggesting that I have never participated in idle gossip – I have – not proud of it, but I have.  We’ve all been there at one time or another.  I write about this incident today as a reminder to myself that it does harm.  That harm may be microscopic in the moment but it has a way of entering the psyche and spreading virally.  Put simply, it does not help.  There is no positive momentum created by tearing someone else down – no matter how deserving we feel they may be.

I wondered what causes us to engage in this type of dialogue?  Insecurity?  Fear?  Attention?  Jealousy?   Pick one or add one.  What I chose to pay more attention to after the evening had concluded was recalling the energy and vibe in the corners of the room where folks were not participating in the negative conversation.  What did those individuals?  How did that dialogue feel? – all good.  This is what I decided to listen to.