Easy Ways To Be A More Inspiring Executive

When leaders report to an uninspiring executive, the negative impact on productivity and execution is real. Too often, uninspiring leaders often are the last ones to see this behavior in themselves, and in my years coaching executives, I rarely see leaders get more than generalized feedback in this critical area, without many practical steps or ways to improve. To address, consider the following:

Our Ideas Inspire Us More than Others

A boring, uninspiring executive conjures up an image of someone droning on about a dry topic in a monotone voice. In truth, uninspiring leadership looks more like an executive with a lack of awareness about the audience. When an executive is seen as boring, it’s often because they assume that what matters to them matters equally to others. You’ll see this type of senior leader doing more talking than listening, asking few questions, reading slides or reporting out information, and then wondering why the audience is so quiet or unresponsive in the meeting.

The Opposite of Uninspiring is Curiosity

How to become more inspiring? Assume your audiences do not care, even if you’re talking about what should be a matter of importance to others. When you start from that cynical point of view, it forces you to ask better questions and get deeply curious about your audiences. For example, when raising an important issue in a meeting, you might ask yourself: How would this audience define value, in the context of this topic, versus how I see it? Audiences will only care once they understand the value in your ideas and how that value applies to them. When we’re uninspiring, we simply forget to connect those dots for the audience.

Inspiration in Practice: How One Finance Executive Did It

Several years ago, I was invited to attend a meeting run by a Chief Audit Officer on reporting and I’ll be the first to admit that I was not chomping at the bit to attend what I anticipated would be a major snoozefest. (To all my Chief Audit readers, forgive my ignorance.) Imagine my surprise when this meeting turned out to be one the best I’ve ever attended. What made the discussion so energizing was the leader himself, who had called the meeting together because of legislative changes requiring a major shift in reporting that would impact workload and team operations.

To Inspire, Focus On The Better Tomorrow

Knowing these changes were imminent, it would have been easy for the finance executive to plow ahead and dive into planning and logistics associated with the upcoming changes. Instead, he took time with the team to focus on the future, painting a very powerful picture of what life would feel like in six months, once this project was behind the team.

As he led the team in dialogue, it was interesting to observe their reaction. Every time the conversation started to turn to, “We don’t have the resources,” or “We can’t handle more change,” the leader gently brought them back to a future focus. In a matter of hours, the team went from resisting, even dreading the changes, to seeing this effort as something that could make them better as an audit team. Eventually, they came to agree that while the reporting changes would be a short-term hassle, in the long run, it would help them finally break free from creating hundreds of low-value reports they generated in the past.

Notice How Often You Talk About How Tough It Is

It’s easy to talk about what is difficult, tough, or challenging, but the problem is, it’s boring, it motivates absolutely nobody, and it keeps us stuck. After a while, it just gets boring to talk about the workload, the lack of resources, how busy we are, how tough our market is, the challenging quarter we just got through, and so on. What’s crazy is how often we do this inside companies, and it’s incredibly counterproductive, because in most cases, the conversation never really evolves beyond how tough things are. Start to pay attention to whether this a pattern you fall into, and simply shift the balance, so that you’re also talking about solutions, about the future, or about what we can control to influence a different outcome instead.

Being uninspiring isn’t a personality defect; it’s something that can happen to the best of us, and the good news is that with simple behavior changes, we can improve in this area quickly. To start, ask yourself questions like: Do others really engage in my meetings? Do I find myself talking mostly about challenges and how tough things are? Do people describe me as inspiring? Do I do enough listening and asking questions? Become curious about your responses and consider where you can put a few simple changes into place. It’s worth the effort, because when we can do more to inspire and engage others, we inspire and energize ourselves, too.