Your Vitamin C for Growth Acceleration

Winter has come visiting, dressed in all its pale and sparkling finery, and it’s brought the same gift for many people: a cold. Settling beneath a heap of blankets to sweat out the shivers and aches, you reach for the vitamin C tablets to see you through. Watching this annual phenomenon, I’ve found myself thinking about how executive & team development is like looking after your health, and about how growth acceleration support is your career’s vitamin C.

That might sound like a stretch, so let me explain.

Last summer, a European business partner was telling me about how some clients view his work. He’d noticed that they seem to position advisers & coaches as troubleshooters, called in when a specific problem becomes visible, and then leaving once it’s resolved. It’s like how we reach for the vitamin C tablets when we’re sick, and then ignore them when we’re well.

But if you want vitamin C to help your health, that’s the wrong approach. Big doses don’t banish colds and erase what you have missed because of it. It’s a smaller, consistent dose over time that boosts your immune system and reduces the risk of sickness in the first place.

The same applies to executive & team development support.

To be most effective, support from a Growth Acceleration Adviser or Coach isn’t only about solving a crisis or patching you up when something breaks down. It’s a supplement to support healthy professional growth, like vitamin C helps protect and grow your body. We live in a busy, fast-changing world in which you need not just to maintain, but accelerate your professional growth. Unfortunately, if you wait until things have gone wrong before you reach out for support, you’ve potentially inflicted the burdens of a crisis upon yourself. You have to put extra effort in just to stand still, or recover, never mind moving forward.

Let’s face it, two things motivate us at a base human level – gaining pleasure and avoiding pain. We instinctively react to avoid imminent pain, although that means working in a defensive mode, responding to crises while missing the opportunity to improve. While we need that instinct when things go wrong, we find it’s even more important to invest in the growth that will bring the pleasure and benefits of fewer crises and more effectiveness in handling them when they do occur.

I have a dearly valued client who’s a senior leader at a large company, someone very effective, yet tough and demanding in style. Because they came up through the company, gaining broad experience and expertise, they know the details of how to do it all, which can be invaluable when properly focused. Now… when things get challenging and stressful, that same combination of toughness and knowledge turns into micro-management, which damages relationships with others and undermines morale and collaboration. Historically, the end result has been a collateral people crisis, which they would call me in to help resolve. Eventually, they realized that this reactionary mode was only getting them back to where they had started, at best, so they changed their approach. Now, we’re working on more proactive and sustained development and growth, internalizing positive leadership behaviors and dynamics, rather than trying to repair relationships after the damage is done. Regular vitamin C in the good times, not downing the bottle when you get sick.

If you don’t take your vitamins while you’re healthy then you’ll never grow strong enough to avoid getting sick. That’s as true of executive & team development as it is of your body, and it’s as true of my valued client & friend at that big company as it is of someone sitting shivering under a pile of blankets on the couch. So, if you want to talk about building the most healthy professional life, please feel free to reach out to me anytime.