Fellow Leaders: It Is a Sign of Strength to be Supportive

As leaders, you and I strive to demonstrate success and strength to our teams. We desire to inspire our employees' confidence in us - confidence that we make sound decisions, establish stability, and ensure business longevity. Because we are strong leaders, we believe we are capable of inspiring the vision, strategy, and execution of a long career and fulfilling future for our teams.

We also continue to grow and develop personally and professionally so that our employees see that we are:

• Respectful & Professional

• Humble & Confident

• Creative & Forward-thinking

• Open-minded & Reliable

.....And supportive

We remind our employees that we "have their backs" and "stand behind them" through increasing workload, ever-present (and necessary) change, and economic and business challenges. Because you and I truly care about our teams, we also continue to support them as they learn, grow, and make mistakes. We lead them through projects and encourage them to have collaborative and honest conversations targeting mutually beneficial "win-win" solutions when tensions or differences of opinions arise.

It is also a sign of strength and true leadership to be supportive of our peers.

All too often, leaders forget that being respectful, professional, open-minded, and collaborative applies at the peer level just as it does when leading employees. Particularly in times of stress, uncertainty, and change, leaders tend to build silos around various "sandboxes", draw hard lines between business units which should be aligned and standardized, and forego the common courtesy of communication. When leaders cannot recognize that their colleagues are all working towards the same goals, an attitude of scarcity, back-stabbing, passive-agressive resistance, and hidden agendas arises.

Those behaviors are detrimental to business success, employee morale, and leadership credibility.

The same recommendations we make to our teams to have open discussion geared towards understanding and positive solutions are important as we all work with our colleagues.

As leaders, we should work closely together in a supportive manner. We should grant grace to each other during the pains and challenges of change instead of waiting for the first opportunity to tear each other down. We should be targeting an environment of open dialogue, honest feedback, and respect for each other. We should ensure we do not blind-side each other with "public" critique and instead should be cheering each other on and looking for ways to contribute to our colleagues' success.

This is how we build the confidence of our teams and earn the reputation of being credible and honest. Being supportive, fellow leaders, is a sign of strength.