Leadership lessons creating a new website.

Last week I launched a new website after a month or two focussed on rebranding.

The process revealed a number of leadership lessons, in themselves quite simple, yet worthy of consideration.

Here are 3 on my mind today: 

1. When you don’t know how to do something, don’t stay stuck, involve others.

A number of things kept me away from creating a new website for quite a few years: the biggest was I didn’t really know how to start.  As leaders we can often keep things to ourselves for too long, projects and initiatives that we are stuck on, things in our too hard basket. Perhaps, and it was so for me as a line manager, we tend to delegate only the things we know how to do ourselves. This is not a good strategy for getting things done.  The alternative of course is to engage people who do know or might know, how to get started. 

Ask for help, get others’ input, involve others. 

In my case, it was accepting an offer of help to manage the project that unlocked progress, access to IT and design expertise that I lacked. 

2. Get clear on your purpose, what you really stand for NOW, then everything else starts to flow.

Creating the website required me to get clear on what I stand for now, the difference I want to make now and the work I want to be doing now. I emphasise the word NOW. This was not easy or necessarily comfortable. Only when I was clear on purpose was I able to create the materials and resources I needed for the website. It started to flow and I could energise others to support.

As Leaders, how often do we get clear on, or refresh our sense of purpose, for ourselves as well as our teams?  Creative energy is released when we and others have clear purpose. 

A core empowering leadership responsibility is to get clear purpose for ourselves and to help others get shared purpose. 

3. Get feedback to really understand how you are experienced.  

To really get a sense of my brand I asked a handful of trusted clients and colleagues for feedback: “How do you experience me when I am at my best? not at my best? and what difference does that make to you?”  It helped me get a contemporary sense of both how I had grown in my practice and what was still essentially me.

Leaders tend to live in a context where meaningful feedback is in short supply, even non-existent.  I encourage leaders to intentionally establish feedback loops to validate how they are doing. It helps us grow, refine, and to be the best versions of ourselves more often.

I would love to know if and how any of this resonates with your leadership life.