On Stage

I am 37. I am on stage presenting to the 500 staff of the business I now lead. I am laying out a business strategy which is designed to combine  four disparate businesses into a single business unit. I am announcing a radical restructure which replaces existing teams with a single leadership team. I am presenting a strategic and financial plan based on synergies between the four businesses.

I am speaking to these 500 people to convince them to trust me to lead them.

And internally my brain is screaming, how can you do this? Is this real?

Success had definitely come sooner than confidence.

How Did I Get Here?

Within the organisation I was working for I had been identified as a high flyer and two years earlier I was promoted to my first leadership role, running a small international subsidiary. The business developed extremely well and as a result, I was singled out for further promotion.

The company had recently bought four small businesses and had the strategy to bring them together into a single business unit leveraging synergies between them. I was selected to lead this transformation and join the Senior Leadership Team of the overall business.

How I Felt

I was motivated by the challenge of building something new and proud to be recognised by the company for the contribution I had already made. I was determined to do everything in my power to make this a success. I could see that this would be the making of my career. My determination was blind, which was a contributory factor to the overall outcome.

It was only standing on that stage presenting to the business that the realisation of what I was doing suddenly hit me. The self-doubt and my inner critic came to the fore, how could I be so presumptuous to think I could lead these people who had all been very successful in their businesses? What were the skills and capabilities that I had that made me able to lead in the way I was expected to?

What I Did With the Doubt

To counter these feelings, I set about doing the two things that so far had made me successful.

The first was to build a brilliant team around me. The core team I built included a CFO, Sales, HR and Marketing Leaders and together we set about the transformational strategy we had developed. I have never been worried about hiring the best people for the roles. Having good people executing will lead to the best results for the whole team. Being a leader does not mean you have to be the best at everything, it means giving those who work for you the space to do their best.

The second thing was simply to work as hard as I could to make sure that we were successful. This came at a personal cost as my work/life balance suffered badly at a time when the children were young and growing up quickly. This has been a problem throughout my working life.

Being a part of the SLT was also difficult. We met weekly and I felt like an imposter in those meetings. I only contributed when I was spoken to, otherwise I was scared to speak. Everyone else seemed so much more experienced than I was. This was not the collaborative experience or culture that I had expected, which was disappointing.

It Didn’t Work

Ultimately the project ended in failure. The fundamental premise was flawed from the start. The synergies didn’t exist and so the business plan could not be executed. Eighteen months later the business unit was dismantled.

I made the team I built redundant.

I lost my job.

Reflections

As an initial leadership experience this was hard, but it is in times of difficulty and challenge that you as a leader learn so much, certainly a lot more than when things are going well.

I learnt a lot across those 18 months. The power of creating a good team, the need to present yourself as a leader to the outside world and take accountability for the team, the importance of delegating and concentrating on the big things that you can control.

Looking back, I now recognise the forces that I experienced: ambition, recognition, excitement, the challenge of proving myself, fear of missing the opportunity, of being overlooked in the future. Each played a part in me unthinkingly grabbing this opportunity with both hands. I also see that when ambition and self-doubt collide my one instinct was to prove myself by pushing harder, not stopping, thinking and questioning the premise.

With the self-awareness and experience I have now, I would like to say to my 37-year-old self,

“Stop. Think this through. Is this business strategy plausible? Is it going to work?”

Over the years I have recognised that leadership isn’t always about having the confidence to act, it’s also about having enough self-awareness to stop, create some space, and question what you’re about to do.

At the time, having just let my entire leadership team go and lost my own job, things seemed very bleak, particularly as I was so driven and ambitious. But 30 years on I have had an incredibly rewarding career, and I have definitely lived to tell the tale!