Leadership Intimacy. It’s All About You.

Leadership springs from what you believe, how you act, how you learn, and how you improve. But you and your success are just the beginning. To leverage your ability, your power, and your success, you have to multiply it. And that requires you to lead. To lead others, you have to begin by leading yourself. Only after you know yourself, what you believe, and what you stand for—in the most intimate way—can you expect to lead and coach others. Would you follow you?

Many of you reading this have already achieved success as effective leaders. The challenge I often find in organizations has to do with the other “yous.” Since you can’t do everything yourself, since you can’t be everywhere at once, you delegate. Smart move. That’s good leadership. Unless, of course, the leaders you’ve empowered to work with you are not 100 percent in sync with you and the goals you’ve set for your organization.

Getting all your leaders on the same page and in perfect harmony with your strategic direction may not be as daunting a challenge as you might imagine. But it does require what I call coaching through Leadership Intimacy. It means getting intimate, first with yourself and what makes you get out of bed in the morning, then with your people—their dreams, their goals, their reason for getting up and to work on time.

After an intimately honest appraisal of these motivating forces, within you and your subordinates, you can begin to align yourself and your team in a way that moves your organization up from surviving to thriving. This alignment is only the first of four steps in the CoachQuest Cycle. To learn more about becoming a manager who can coach with intimacy, see CQ Development Cycle.

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