Overview: Endurance is an essential leadership quality that allows leaders to prevail against adversity. It inspires and empowers their teams in the long term. Leadership is an action, not a position of power. It requires leaders to encourage constructive collaboration, help team members find comfort in uncertainty, and deliver continuous motivation.
Successful leadership is about inspiration, vulnerability, humility, and empowerment. Above all, it’s about maturity, resilience, and endurance. Endurance is one of the seldom-discussed facets of intelligent leadership, yet it’s an essential facet as success is a marathon requiring both resilience and endurance. How can you increase your leadership endurance? What can you do to keep up with the constantly changing business landscape and avoid burnout? How can leadership coaching help you?
What Is Leadership Endurance?
Leadership coaching professionals define endurance as the ability to remain steadfast through uncertainty, and the global economy has served up plenty of uncertainty.
Leadership endurance enables leaders to apply existing resources and experiences to devise solutions for new problems. It also allows them to continue to drive results despite uncertainty and strife.
Enduring leadership inspires followers over the long term, helping them overcome challenges and build careers despite adversity.
How Can Leaders Improve Their Endurance?
High-performing leadership is impressive, but also resource and effort intensive. Giving 110% all the time might look good on paper, but it’s not easy. Here’s what leaders can do to stay on top of the leadership game.
Using Momentum to Conserve Motivation
Leadership coaching is instrumental in helping leaders conserve their leadership momentum and motivation. For high-performing leaders, giving 110% is normal. Those around them grow to expect this level of performance at all times. They raise the bar so high on performance that it touches their ceiling, leaving them stranded and unable to figure out where to go from there.
Newly promoted leaders face similar conundrums. Once they hit certain performance levels, it becomes unclear where they can go from that point. To make matters worse, the skills that got them there won’t get them further.
Complacency may set in, further hamstringing leaders and robbing them of the tools and willpower to continue their leadership journeys.
Executive coaching makes it clear disruption is the key to maintaining motivation and momentum.
Leaders should cherish disruption because it allows them to explore new opportunities. Disruption compels them to assess what they want to stop, continue, and start doing as leaders. It forces them to change.
Once they embrace disruption, leaders can maintain their momentum by exposing themselves and team members to external stimuli in the form of virtual or live events, case studies, seminars, etc.
Finding Comfort in Uncertainty
We hesitate to leave our comfort zones because, among other benefits, they give us certainty. We’re naturally averse to ambiguity and uncertainty, but that’s what we get when we leave our comfort zones. Executive coaching preaches, however, that life begins outside our comfort zones. Given leaders must act as agents of change and disruption, this applies to them doubly.
What can leaders do to find comfort in uncertainty? They can work on their change management skills, including communication and active listening.
What can they do to create comfort in uncertainty for others? They can communicate better by customizing their messages based on their audiences. They can focus on providing information even when they don’t have all the answers.
Reality testing helps leaders analyze real and hypothetical situations to differentiate between assumptions and facts.
Focusing on Honest, Wholesome Collaboration
True collaboration encourages diversity in thoughts, perspectives, and contributions. It’s not about achieving harmony, but finding optimal solutions at the end of careful, critical analyses and deliberations.
Collaboration helps teams build shared accountability and psychological ownership of contributions and outcomes. Honest, constructive collaboration relies on two ingredients: creative conflict and healthy debate.
Leaders who know how to foster creative collaboration improve their endurance in lockstep with the endurance and resilience of their teams.
Leadership endurance requires intentional, continued development. Executive coaching can provide guidance and assistance, allowing leaders to build maturity, resilience, and endurance.