About my perspective on leadership and personal growth

It is my mission to help find meaning and direction in increasingly dynamic, uncertain and confusing times, by coaching/mentoring on personal growth and leadership

I worked for 25 years in big high-tech multinationals. I worked on the rise of mobile telephony, on the transformation of the lighting market from lamps to LED, and on a transformation to specialised healthcare. I was a technical specialist, a project manager, did B2B acquisition en production ramp-ups; I was a program manager, a group manager and climbed the company ladder towards executive level, leading organisations of about 700 FTE ( See https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeroensluijter/). Driven by increasing speed and complexity in the world organisations seem to get into a state of continuous reorganisation. In that context I saw how many leaders have the feeling that they have no grip anymore on their environment, and therefore apply more and more the style of command & control, of micromanagement.  This happened at the cost of wellbeing and motivation, and yielded only mediocre results. I met also leaders who inspired me to think differently and so I came to the insight of how an high engagement / high performance organisation in essence works. And I started leading accordingly:

• It starts with quality. Recruit very good people with the right expertise and experience and attitude. It seems very obvious but it is crucial.
• Motivate these people intrinsically. Inspire on the mission of the organisation. Invest in personal growth. Where does passion meet with talent. This then has to coincide with the role in the company.
• When you have intrinsically motivated people with the right quality, empower them and scale up to organisational level by investing in cooperation. Then the whole becomes bigger than the sum of the parts.

This is quite different from command & control and micromanagement. This approach increases wellbeing and motivation. It is about letting people blossom i.s.o. treating them as business assets available for exploitation. Then they will give much more then you can ever take from them. A process arises that grows bigger than the sum of the parts: mediocre performance becomes high performance, rigid becomes agile, slow becomes fast. Then you do not have to worry anymore about your KPI dashboard, that is then already pro-actively been taken care of. Then you can use time for teaming up and building direction. This is what I call servant leadership.

In order to put people in their strength, you have to do that first for yourself. You have to heal yourself first before you can help others. If you try to be different from who you really are because others (or maybe you yourself) expect that from you, you have to struggle continuously with yourself. Then you are not really available for the other. But if you know and accept yourself for who you really are, you can stop the struggle with yourself. Then you can open up to people and listen without judgment, and really help people to grow.

That is the way of transformation to one’s authentic self. If you as a leader do that, people will choose to follow you, out of free will and intrinsically motivated, and not because they have to. Because you take them with you to a better world and facilitate growth. Then trust grows as basis for fertile cooperation i.s.o. cramping because of fear.

If my perspective on leadership inspires you, and you are looking to deepen or grow yours, maybe I would be able to help you through a coaching/mentoring trajectory, for individuals or teams. In an introduction meeting we could explore possible goals and an approach.

Examples of specific topics could be:

• Personal growth and transformation – leadership and finding your own personal style
• Organisational transformation, change management and strategic workforce planning
• Executive and/or middle-management coaching
• Mid-life/mid-career coaching and/or work/life balance
• Meaning & purpose in life – grand strategy
• Business politics and how to deal with it