Finding Your Leadership Voice

Have you ever found yourself in a senior meeting surrounded by strong personalities and unable to voice your opinions? You tell yourself to speak up but nothing comes out. You have a great idea but don’t share it and then someone else raises it and gets the credit and you tell yourself off for not having the guts to put yourself out there. Worse still, you leave the meeting knowing that you could have contributed more and find all of the faults in yourself until the next time, when you will likely do the same.

This was the case in a recent engagement I had with a high performing female leader within a large banking institution. She told me that as an introverted female leader operating in a largely male dominated and extroverted environment that she struggled to bring her best performances to senior meetings due to the strong personalities around the table. She found herself in these settings not able to bring her true voice to the table, often fumbling for the right words. She wanted to improve her leadership presence in these settings and admitted to losing some level of self-confidence.

Thankfully, such situations are easy to address and over the next months we set about addressing her confidence in these meetings. We mapped out some of the features of the performance setting to understand better the impact it was having on her as a leader. Then we co-created a new way of approaching these meetings that would enable her to bring her own unique qualities to the room.

Some of the elements of the work we did together that helped this leader’s performance included reshaping her thinking patterns in the run up to these meetings including her purpose in them, getting really clear on her intension for the meetings including how she wanted others to think and feel, and developing consistent rituals to support her before, during and after the performance itself.

After just one workshop together she put into practice our initial success blueprint and she came back beaming with the success she had attained. Over the course of the next months we continued to reflect, learn and grow so that the practice we initiated was well established.

On a personal note, I love helping leaders like this build their authentic leadership confidence so that they can have the impact they want in the world.