Ian Kinnery is a leading North East business coach. During the past 19 years, he has coached hundreds of business leaders and is a previous European Business Coach of the Year winner.
According to a recent Entrepreneurs’ Forum poll, 44 per cent of North East business leaders identified people as the biggest problem in the modern workplace.
For the past 19 years, I’ve coached hundreds of North East CEOs and entrepreneurs, helping to scale-up their businesses which means developing them as leaders.
Often they’ve told me that they too have people problems. But my answer is always the same.
People are not the problem – how you deal with them is.
As Jim Rohn says, ‘Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better’.
Our duty as leaders is to find ways to connect with all of our staff.
Our duty is to understand them, and our duty is to find ways of communicating with them.
A good example of this is how we perhaps interact with younger employees.
One recent survey by a CV website found that almost three-quarters of managers claimed Gen Z staff were more difficult to work with than previous generations.
Respondents felt staff from the group lacked effort, productivity, and motivation.
But as leaders, is it our duty to find a solution to this. And to find it, it often requires a degree of flexibility of thought and deed to connect with more people more easily.
I’ve recently launched a new YouTube series as part of my 2024 campaign on the ‘Changing World of Work’, which focuses on the modern workplace.
As we all know the workplace has become far less rigid, and flexibility is crucial in the modern environment.
In fact, a survey commissioned just as the world eased out of the pandemic found that around half of staff believed workplace flexibility – be it working hours or location – had become equally as important as traditional benefits such as paid leave and pension.
As leaders, our duty is to listen to that and act.
Besides growing businesses, one of the great things coaching can do is help leaders develop the skills that perhaps have prevented them from doing just that.
Communication, empathy, and flexibility are vital tools that can enable you to work with – not against – those people within your business who you perhaps struggle to gel with.
Leaders may already possess the know-how. But the art of coaching is all about behaviour change, and it teaches people how to apply that knowledge.
Often it is about addressing bad habits; 99 per cent of what we do is habit, from how we type to the leg we first slip into our trousers – but it can also involve how we communicate and work with our staff and colleagues.
So if we want different results, perhaps it is time to do something different.
And maybe don’t just instinctively blame the other person.
kinnery.co.uk