From Chaos to Clarity: Mastering Leadership with Grounded Focus

Feet in ballet shoes consumed by roots

I was blowing it. There I was, sitting with a direct report who ran an important program in a far corner of the state. He came to see me in person because he needed my input on several urgent matters, but the moment he sat down, my phone started blowing up with email notifications, text alerts, and phone calls. My eye kept drifting to the mounting scroll of unread email on my laptop. We weren’t a minute into our conversation before I picked up my phone and tapped out a quick response to someone.

His face sank. “Brigid, I’ve been planning for this meeting for a month,” he said. “I can’t go back without answers.”

If you’ve been a leader in an organization for any length of time, you’ve had at least one of these wake-up calls. You’re preoccupied, scattered, unfocused, and much worse, not providing the support your staff needs to succeed. In short, you’re not grounded.

Learning to ground yourself in the present moment is one of the most valuable skills you can have as a leader today. It’s not just some concept pulled from pop psychology or new age spirituality. It’s the critical difference between leadership that is stagnant and underperforming and one that is resilient.

During a typical leadership interview process, one of the first questions they ask you is to explain your leadership style and to talk about how you will lead the organization. If they hire you, it is largely because they liked what they heard. But from the moment you sit down at your desk on the first day, there will be all sorts of forces seeking to change your leadership style and divert your focus in hundreds of different directions. Meeting requests will pile up, emails, texts, unsolicited advice, demands from stakeholders, and emergencies. Without being grounded, your leadership will become a reflection of all this external input: messy, fragmented, and without direction.

You’re going to have to develop a practice to stay grounded and focused:  delegate it, or just ignore it. You don’t need to attend every meeting, answer every email, or return every phone call.

I hear your voices already: You don’t understand. There are so many things to do, so many fires to put out. If I don’t handle it, the roof will cave in.

I hear you. Leaders are always going to have to manage a bit of frenzy. But multitasking is not your path to larger success. Numerous studies have shown this*. Moreover, you weren’t hired to do everything. You were hired to be a strategic leader to guide an organization full of talented people.

Make an effort to only do one thing at a time. And make sure that this one thing takes you closer to where you want your leadership and your organization to be in five or ten years.

Some might say that being present in the moment actually undermines long-term strategic thought, but the opposite is true. When you are truly focused on the long vision, you can choose the tasks that demand your undivided attention right now. Those tasks will be the antidote to the many pressures you’re feeling to perform against your long-range goals.

Getting yourself grounded is your path to being the leader you want to be, not one determined by all the noise around you.

#ResilientLeadership #GroundedLeader

*There are a lot of published papers on this topic. Here is just one.

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Brigid McCormack

Brigid McCormack is an evangelist for exceptional leadership. Brigid believes leadership is a skill that can be developed, cultivated, and honed over time. For the past 24 years, Brigid has worked inside mission driven organizations. As an executive and leader, her passion has been to identify and develop strong leaders, create inclusive cultures and enable employees to not just have meaningful careers but also to flourish. Brigid now works as an executive coach with leaders on an individual basis to accelerate or enhance their leadership skills.

Her journey began with a love of the natural world. At a young age, her father took her birding in California’s Sierra mountains, and Brigid quickly learned the names and sounds of all her favorites: the pileated woodpecker, the cedar waxwing, and the red-winged blackbird. Serving in the Peace Corps, she confronted the polluted legacy of a century of an extractive economy in Ukraine.

After eight years as a major gifts fundraiser—first at the Wharton School at the University of California and then at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business—her passion for protecting nature drew her to senior leadership roles at ClimateWorks and Audubon California. She has spent the last five years advising high net-worth clients entering the climate philanthropy space.

The drive for coaching

Herself the beneficiary of terrific mentors and executive coaches over the course of her career, Brigid always placed a premium on building the leadership skills of the team around her—from the early career managers to seasoned directors to C-suite. Among her proudest accomplishments is empowering some of California’s rising conservation leaders.

While her passion for the natural world has never waned, Brigid has shifted her focus to working closely with the leaders who will propel mission-driven organizations to success.

Qualified and inspired

In addition to her own executive experience, Brigid is Hudson Institute trained executive coach, a Dare to Lead trained facilitator, and a Tara Mohr Playing Big Facilitator. She has a BA in History and BS in Biology from Santa Clara University and a MS in Environmental Management from University of San Francisco.

Brigid still takes time to get outside and listen to the birds of Northern California, while hiking, running, or backpacking with her family. The peaceful moments are important, fuel for her work with the people and organizations working hard to stop the climate crisis and conserve natural places.