Transitions are a part of a leader's life. It was Heraclitus who told us 2,000 years ago that Change is the only thing that remains constant.
We are constantly navigating transitions, some that we create & many that are thrust upon us. Over time I discovered that every transition had three stages, the first was the ending, where something -job, career, relationship ended either abruptly or over a short period. It may also be the end of some aspects of your leadership style. As they say, what got you here wouldn't get you there. With experience, we find that we have to let go of the old, in both our daily habits & what's going on in our minds. The second stage is this neutral zone, where you have let go of the old but you are still coming to terms with it. The stage where you are in is a unique bridge period, where everything is confusing. What is unique about this neutral stage is that liminal feeling, of being in a world in between where you came from & possibly where you are going. And then if you navigate this neutral zone, you are onto the third stage. This is the final stage in every transition, a new beginning.
I believe that we have paid too much importance to new beginnings. In my coaching work, I spend a lot of time with my coachees on "endings". How do I know when that stage is complete, am I really beginning something new or have I hurried through the ending & not given enough time to my neutral zone.
I remember all my transitions very vividly. I moved from a very large FMCG company to a very young Retail setup. My oldest memory is when I was first given a team to lead. I had moved from the FMCG business in Brittania to a role as head of marketing at Shoppers Stop. The job was new, the industry was new & I had a large team for the first time. Sometimes I made the mistake of going too fast through the edge of my comfort zone, almost as if I just wanted to move on & get rid of that feeling of not being in control. And back then, in 1998, I had no clue about my relationship with endings. But many things had ended for me with this stint, I had stopped being an individual contributor now. This was my first stint as a Team leader & a CXO in a smaller company. It was a new industry to me & to many of my colleagues. I was learning & so were they. Mobile phones were known then & as the Head of Marketing, I was given this huge bulky Nokia instrument that we called a mobile phone then (late 1990s). When I think of myself at that time, what comes to mind is the hunger to grow & how everything else seemed to be relatively unimportant. Only in retrospect can I see my fragility, how beneath the surface there was a lot of fear & anxiety. I had ended a career in FMCG & migrated to a very new industry. But I actually had no clue about what baggage from my past was I carrying & how was that impacting my leadership style in the moment. What was I carrying in my baggage that could be let go of making me a lighter traveler. Maybe it was some judgment or belief or maybe some acquired behavior from others! A smaller company could have aided my transition into multiple leadership styles. By nature I was a pacesetting leader, here was an opportunity to become more affiliative. My pacemaking style was about high energy, always pushing to find ways to get things done, and an eagerness to step in and take over. The outstanding affiliative leader is good at saying just the right thing or making the appropriate symbolic gesture at just the right moment. So for me as primarily a pacesetting leader here was an opportunity to use the affiliative style more often, by improving my level of empathy. Ending my FMCG career & starting in a new industry was actually a great opportunity to leave many rigidly held beliefs behind. I was joining a much smaller company & it was actually an opportunity to build deeper relationships.
My move as the CMO for HDFC Bank fuelled another level of transition for me. It was a transition of scale & scope as I had joined a significantly larger organization. It was another transition in industry change, as I knew nothing about banking. For the first few months, I remember I could not understand much in meetings -all banking lingo was so alien. Even here, my memories are about driving visible, meaningful outcomes. Doing things differently and creating a lot of energy within my team for sharper results were the themes that resonated sharply with me then. And at the same time, I have memories of pushing people hard & nothing being good enough. The end of my previous innings & what parts of my leadership style could I modify was not even on my agenda then.
My next significant transition was when I was 43 and co-founded Cequity & what a ride it was! I had been a client all my life for service providers & here I was, crossing the chasm & becoming an adviser. I had worked for big brands all my life P&G, Shoppers Stop & HDFC bank & now I was creating a new brand as an entrepreneur. I was part of large companies & played a role in their culture & then I co-created culture as an entrepreneur. A company’s culture is mostly about what leaders “do” & not so much about what they “say.” Most of what I did was about hustling & getting things done. That was important; we may not have survived without hustling. Of course, people could work with & live with an asshole if he worked for a big brand, but when you ran your shop, that didn’t hold. It was difficult for me to retain my hunger for success and my aggression & yet become conscious that my leadership style was not working. It was not an easy journey.
So while significant visible transitions are essential stages in any professional’s life, the real hard work of transitions happens silently with no announcement. And what gets missed out in these transitions is to focus on what is ending, before you can chart out your new beginning.
Today when I coach my clients who happen to be in some sort of transition, I spend a lot more time on what they are ending & how they are doing it. You have to end before you begin. And often every end creates a bunch of triggers that impact your identity. Who you think you are is changing & a host of possible selves can be available to those of us who look. This is what moves us into the neutral zone, a liminal zone, where we are confused & struggling.
Through my coaching work, I now realize that we all experience endings but all my clients have their own way of dealing with them. It was their unique style of treating something that had ended. Some of them moved fast & didn't waste their thinking over what's done-maybe they got downsized or they realized they were not growing. Either way, they did not reflect much on what was over & got aggressively into what they called new beginnings-a. new job or an entrepreneurial opportunity. Other clients got so influenced by something ending that were almost paralyzed. Endings can be a great point to examine our leadership style & reset if needed. Endings are not only about layoffs, downsizing & new jobs. They may actually be about many aspects of your leadership style that you want to end. Parts of your leadership style that got you here will not help you grow further. What parts of our style do we keep with us & what do we jettison?
This is the stage, in my work with my coaching clients, where I like to introduce the concept of "Outsight". As developed by Dr Herminia Ibarra, the Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behaviour at London Business School (LBS), "Outsight" is about acting your way into a new way of thinking and being. You cannot discover yourself by introspection. Thinking of yourself as a living laboratory helps make the invisible transitions far easier.
So the work I do is about helping my clients set up these small experiments with their own leadership style. Help them start by changing small parts of their leadership style-how they talk, how they listen & how they push people to act. I encourage them to try alternate ways of doing the same thing. Try different paths. Take action, and then use the feedback from your actions to figure out what is working for you & then scale that up.
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from" -T. S. Eliot
Loved this: “while significant visible transitions are essential stages in any professional’s life, the real hard work of transitions happens silently with no announcement. And what gets missed out in these transitions is to focus on what is ending, before you can chart out your new beginning.”