At Intend2Lead, we’ve spent the past decade working with high-performing leaders, helping them create sustainable, successful careers by leaning away from perfectionism and into conscious leadership driven by self-awareness, embracing curiosity, and empowering others.
Overcoming perfectionism to achieve sustainable success
In our ten years as trusted advisors to firms and individuals in the accounting profession, we see, more than ever, the need for conscious leadership. In order to better serve our community, we created a conscious leadership model we use with our clients to help them move from perfectionism to sustainable success as leaders in the accounting profession.
Our model consists of three overlapping concentric circles: Self, Coaching, and Vulnerability. Where those three circles overlap is the Dimension of Possible: an elevated place where you see the world differently; where fear is no longer the enemy, and love reigns.
In the circle of self, leaders are asked to define what success looks like for them. Without knowing that, leaders cannot build a sustainable leadership practice.
Why the self matters for sustainable success
In public accounting, it’s easy to get lost in everyone else’s needs and expectations, and as a leader you can end up working outside your wheelhouse, sapping your energy, time, and joy.
This is why we believe so firmly in beginning with Self: self-discovery, self-care, and self-awareness. You can’t help others until you’ve helped yourself.
In self-discovery, we help uncover your personal vision, values, and why. You can’t measure your success, or begin to make it sustainable, without knowing what you want and why you want it.
When you have a vision and see what your guideposts are to get there, your team senses that.
Self-care as energy, time, and boundary management
As a new leader, your energy needs to be focused on empowering your team and expanding their capacity, not just providing all the answers while tracking and accruing your own billable hours.
Sustainable success requires more conscious leadership and forming habits that support your vision, including learning to set boundaries, blocking and protecting your time for your highest priorities, and delegating work. These limits help clarify your focus, so you have more energy when you most need it for yourself, your team, and your firm.
Self-awareness and being the observer
When you know your vision, values, and why, and you begin to set boundaries in service to them, you create space for greater self-awareness and for asking questions like:
- What do I do really well?
- When I feel like my best self, what is it that helped me get there?
- How do I show up in challenging situations?
- How does this compare to how I want to show up?
- What gets in my way?
Answering these types of questions allows you to understand how best to scale your success for the long term.
How a coaching mindset creates sustainable success
Coaching is the second circle in our model and includes receiving coaching, practicing coaching as a leadership style, and creating a coaching culture.
Many people want to learn a tangible or formulaic skill to be a better leader ( oftentimes thinking this will be a short cut to success). And while we believe in, and teach, skills and habits that support leaders, in our combined 25+ years coaching accountants and decades of experience working in the profession ourselves, we have seen first-hand there is no shortcut. You must build a foundation first.
Curiosity is key
Coaching invites self-curiosity and self-observation. It also cultivates curiosity about others and a desire to explore assumptions you may be holding that you didn’t realize were there.
When you build this part of your foundation, you can examine how you lead others now and how you can lead them better in the future. Getting coaching for yourself and your team can help you enhance your self-awareness, overcome your challenges, and envision what kind of leader you want to be.
Receiving coaching is often the first step in cultivating coaching as a leadership style: a way of leading that unlocks your team’s potential by learning and implementing coaching skills yourself, every day, with your team. Coaching as a leadership style embraces a coaching mindset – investing in others and shifting from giving answers to empowering them to think critically and uncover their own ideas and solutions. It also fosters accountability and ownership, building confidence and self-efficacy in your team, which is what you need most, especially in challenging or stressful times.
Creating this type of leadership capacity in others organically produces a culture of coaching, fostering higher levels of creativity, innovation, connection, and belonging; leading to fully engaged, higher performing, and more productive teams. All of which are key factors in your sustainable success as a leader.
Vulnerability builds trust and psychological safety
The third circle in our model represents vulnerability. Vulnerability has three main components: authenticity, asking for help, and creating psychological safety for your team.
Authenticity asks you to share more of your real self and your struggles with your team, in the spirit of moving them forward. It’s easy for others to think leaders have it all figured out, that they’re perfect and never make mistakes.
As a conscious leader, you can choose to remove the mask of perfection and share that you’ve struggled with some of the same things those on your team are struggling with. We encourage leaders to practice authenticity as a strength to help others learn, without oversharing or losing the confidence of your team.
Practicing vulnerability consciously can surface underlying challenges and allow you and your team to address them in healthy ways, rather than having them impact the quality and effectiveness of the work.
Too often in this profession, we get deadline-driven, and priorities become focused on the work and tasks rather than the people doing them. When you share your struggles and mistakes in the spirit of learning, you give your team permission to do the same.
This shared humanity creates a safe place for others to bring more of their whole selves to work, which means they spend less energy masking imperfections and more energy solving problems and delivering a better work product.
Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness
Successful leaders understand they need help and know how to ask for it. Leaders are always learning (no one knows everything!), but many feel as though they have to appear like they have it all together, that they don’t need help.
Asking for help requires vulnerability, authenticity, humility, and curiosity. A conscious leader embraces the fact that you do not have all the answers. You must be coachable yourself by actively soliciting, receiving, and applying feedback. We believe the best leaders ask for help the most – they know how to leverage their team to get things done and ask their peers, senior leaders, and outside experts for guidance and support.
When you combine authenticity and asking for help into your leadership style, you create psychological safety. Over time, you’ll create a space where your team feels safe showing up as they are, asking for help, and sharing their struggles. When you model vulnerability, you give permission for your team to redirect their energy away from perfectionism and towards tackling challenges and creating solutions.
Psychological safety creates more engaged, connected teams that are excited to be at work because they know and care about one another as humans. This leads to cultural “stickiness,” creating a place where people feel like they belong and want to stay and contribute.
These three pillars are required for sustainable leadership success: Self, Coaching, and Vulnerability. When you practice these, you can contribute in more impactful ways that bring you meaning and joy, and you create a space for others to do the same. This is the Dimension of Possible, where we transform and thrive together – as individuals, firms, and as a profession.
If you’re curious about coaching as a leadership style and creating a coaching culture at your firm, take our culture assessment.
See you in the DoP,
