How To Be a Confident Leader During Challenging Times

Four Ways To Lead Confidently During Tough Times

You are a visionary, you have big goals, you are driven, and yet, you struggle to measure whether you’re truly being the leader in your business or organization. You wonder if you’re being strategic or smart enough, because you may sometimes feel all over the place.

Leading during a global pandemic feels messy. And, so you’re thinking whether you’re doing a good job.

You ask yourself:

Am I making the right decisions?

Am I making a real difference?

Do I have the right skills to handle my team and the ever-growing challenges?

Uncertain times like the current one, are opportunities to step up your leadership and become an example for others. Your struggle is often not the lack of ability, but a lack of faith in yourself. So, it’s time to generate radical faith in yourself and leverage your ability to lead your people forward. Because what you don’t have within cannot be inspired in others (1). More than ever, teams and employees are looking to their leaders to pave the way forward.

Here are four ways to support your leadership development and strengthen faith in self immediately:

1. Shift Your Perspective

Challenge the way you perceive leadership.

Leadership development is not about skill-building but rather about building a character.

So instead of viewing leadership as a bunch of skills you should develop or learn, start seeing leadership as a practice you need to develop and engage in. Look at leadership as something beyond a set of skills or a role. See it as a practice you embody and live into.

Apply this new perspective to your leadership.

To make the biggest difference right now, what characteristics would you need to embody?

Be open and honest about your answer to this question. Sit with it. Allow yourself to reflect deeply. To help, here are some things to keep in mind:

Focus on Serving vs. Pleasing

Leaders don’t trap themselves into pleasing people or themselves for the short run. They are committed to serving their people and purpose in the long run.
Pleasing often looks like doing the bare minimum, whereas serving is diving deep and is usually harder.
So, focus on what serving looks like versus what pleasing looks like. For example, it might be tempting to agree or keep quiet to keep everyone pleased; however, it's harder to have tough open conversations that serve everyone in the long run.

Can you stay in integrity and do things that feel hard? Because even though you don’t need to be perfect at doing the hard things, as a leader, you do have to be willing to step into it. Those are moments that strengthen your character.

2. Create a Leadership Vision

Do you have a vision around your leadership?

A vision gives you a direction and focus to build a reality upon.

Whether you are leading a business or an organization, a vision helps you stay aligned, focused, and in integrity to what you’re ultimately trying to achieve. As a business leader, maybe that looks like creating certain outcomes or an impact in your industry. As an organizational leader, perhaps you’re trying to bring a much-needed change in a sector that affects the society in significant ways.

When uncertainty or setbacks come up, it’s your vision that can help in making tough decisions with clarity and in alignment with the ultimate goals. At times like that, doubt and distractions will come up, but do not waver your focus and mind from the steadiness of your vision (2).

Ultimately, having a vision helps you stay in integrity, even when things become uncertain. For example, you need to have a clear direction and clarity of vision, only then will you be able to successfully get your team on board.

3. Nurture The Right Mindset

Mindset is a big one when it comes to supporting your leadership practice. Even though ‘mindset’ has become a buzzword, it is undeniably the key to your leadership and success in anything.

Think of mindset as the lens through which you create and live your life.

This lens shapes your perceptions, your decisions, and your behaviours. But sometimes, it can also create blind spots (3) and obstacles to your growth and success. To overcome these obstacles and gain a growth-oriented perspective you need to nurture your mindset daily.

Why?

Because every leader, even a driven; visionary one like you, has blind spots. And, sometimes these make you run into roadblocks that require mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation. This type of holistic transformation can help you gain a wider perspective shift needed to move the needle forward. For example, during COVID you may be sitting in a lot of uncertainty that could be distracting you from your vision and this could be narrowing your perspective.

Fear is a common mindset block that can distract you from growth-oriented leadership towards growth-diminishing leadership.

A growth-oriented leader:

Works on her mindset every day because she is completely bought into its importance.
Is willing to challenge and grow her mindset, before desiring to influence the minds of others.
Has a mindset practice that helps her see challenges from a radically open perspective vs. her past limited perspectives.
Operates from an empowered mindset of meeting others where they’re at while challenging them to step it up through empowerment instead of power or control.
Believes in modeling what she wants her team or employees to follow.

4. Let Truthfulness and Compassion Be Your Compass

A truly powerful leader has a moral compass that’s rooted in truth, honesty, and compassion (4). This compass guides your language, your energy, your thoughts, your tone, and your impact. It’s this exact compass that will help you earn your people’s trust and loyalty in even challenging times such as the COVID-19 pandemic. But it doesn’t need to be showcased only during big challenges. Even during smaller moments, you can build trust and safety through this compass.

When your language is laced with honesty, truth, and compassion it reflects growth, hope, life, and creativity. It breeds trust and safety. It also gives you and your people the fuel to show up through tough times and celebrate the good ones.

To make sure you are being guided by your compass:

Be mindful of the inner-language you use towards yourself when you may have unknowingly let down the team.
Be compassionate and truthful in your language and tone when having hard conversations such as encouraging a team member to step up after a mess up and do better.
Be sure to give hope, promote growth, and empower - and you can only truly do that if you embody the same in yourself.

A global crisis such as Covid-19 had the ability to quickly and significantly affect businesses and organizations around the world. And at times like this, your leadership becomes even more important. You’ll be required to step out of many comfort zones and none of which are supposed to be easy as a 5-step plan.

So remember, leadership is a practice. That too, a resilient one. It’s not a destination to reach but a journey of responsibility to take. Brace yourself and dive deep.

Have an aha moment while reading this article?

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Harjot Mann, MD

Mindset & Leadership Coach

References:

1. Guru Amar Das, SGGS, Page 647, Stanza 1, Line 4

2. Guru Amar Das, SGGS, Page 909 Stanza 8, Line 1

3. Guru Nanak Dev, SGGS, Page 1246, Stanza 2, Line 2

4. Guru Nanak Dev, SGGS, Page 1245, Stanza 21, Lines 1-2