Over the past 30 years of coaching CEOs, senior teams and leaders around the globe, I’ve lost track of the number of times a high-achieving leader turned to me and asked, “Kevin, how can we step up to achieve more—to go to the next level?” To their surprise, I usually recommend stepping back—pausing—but, because it is antithetical to what they have always done, they insist, “We don’t need to pause more; we need to do more.”
Why would pragmatic, hard-charging, achievement-driven leaders pause in order to accelerate performance and growth? Put simply, that is exactly what is needed to sort through complexity, optimize talent and drive performance to the next level. If we leaders today do not step back to gain perspective and transcend the immediacies of life, we will continue to crash economically, personally and collectively. Our downside survival and upside innovation depend on this transformative process. Certainly, we need to do more to meet the demands of high-performance, complexity and innovation, but in today’s world the doing needs to be new and different.