Julie Krivanek is a strategic plan and process advisor to Boards, CEOs, and Executives in the fresh food and produce industries. She also serves on advisory boards and is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors.
What hasn’t already been said about senior leadership?
That it’s about vision? That it’s about achieving goals through people and teams? That it’s about being driven by purpose and a unique strategy?
By the time a person reaches the C-suite, much is expected and much is assumed. We expect business acumen and the ability to create profitable growth. We expect brains, courage, and fortitude. But what we also expect is “a state of being,” or the type of leader that others wish to emulate and follow.
What hasn’t been said about leadership is that it’s an inside game. It is not about the weather—a constant barrage of headwinds—whether the delivery got there on time, or the never-ending series of tasks needed before people enjoy wonderful fruits and vegetables on their dinner tables.
At its finest, senior leaders are driven by something psychologists call consciousness, defined as “the state of being aware, especially of something within oneself.” Conscious leadership defines “how to be” not “how to do.” It is living and leading in an “inside-out” way.
It’s springtime and the perfect time to strengthen your inner resolve to do what it takes to be a more conscious leader. Who knows? You may be the person who makes a difference in your business and in someone’s life—forever.
Show and Tell is a game children play showing an object and telling something about it. Believe it or not, the game we played so effortlessly as children is foundational, even a pillar, to conscious leadership.
Leaders, especially at the senior level, have critical responsibilities:
This whole Show and Tell game is a normal part of everyday life. We teach babies to walk, use a knife and fork, parents teach their kids to drive, how to stay safe on social media, how to shave, how to stand up straight—and on and on.
It is an easy extension to be in the Show and Tell head space in helping others improve, but sounds like a tall order until you start with a leader’s willingness to have one-on-one conversations. Conversations that help another improve performance, take the next steps, learn new skills, and become more professional. In today’s leadership lingo, Show and Tell is called “coaching and feedback.”
What are some reasons for a leader’s failure? They don’t make time, are not comfortable with conflict or criticism, lack the courage, and don’t enjoy the teacher role. People that work for these leaders are robbed of unique insights, valuable observations, and career experience. And the leader is robbed of service and helping someone along the way.
“What hasn’t been said about leadership is that it’s an inside game.”
- Julie Krivanek, Founder and President, Krivanek Consulting Inc.
Examine your ability to respond rather than react to people or situations that may elicit your knee-jerk reaction or “trigger.”
Leaders are 100 percent influenced by our very first role models for leadership: our parents. Everything? Yes, everything. Make the connection between how you see the world today and the beliefs and behaviors you absorbed during the formative years of childhood about:
Your parents’ story created their reality which they, in turn, projected onto you. This is especially prevalent in family businesses where the views, practices, and values of foremothers and forefathers color generation after generation. Our industry takes loving pride in our family business culture—so, this isn’t a criticism. This is simply a suggestion to challenge beliefs and practices that may need to be modernized.
In some instances, a leader benefits greatly by working with a therapist that can help untangle and move beyond the past.
Bookends act as a frame that holds a stack of books upright. Just like a bookend, a great leader is a supportive framework for the organization and the people in it. It’s hard to put into words the effect of such a leader, other than to say we can feel those effects in everything they touch.
Although senior leadership is rewarding, it can also be a heavy burden. In the produce industry, the pace and pressure are extreme. Burnout, family problems, and addictive behaviors are not unfamiliar. But how do conscious leaders move through storm after storm, uplift others, seek meaningful purpose in their work, all while remaining collected and calm? The very best “bookend,” or open and close, their day with routines and/or rituals to guide and uplift themselves.
I love this statistic. In his best-selling book Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers, Tim Ferriss interviews more than 200 executives, leaders, and world-class performers. He found that more than 80 percent practiced some form of mindfulness or meditation.
You might be surprised to discover the number of executives in our industry that start their day with prayer, inspirational reading, contemplation, scripture, or meditation. These practices form a higher intention for the day, reduce stress and mental rumination, and increase emotional control, higher purpose, self-awareness, and focus.
A bookend is not complete without two parts: a front and a back. For leaders to complete each day, a quiet time thinking about what went well and what could have gone differently creates learning and closure.
A 30,000-foot view of the global industry looks like a huge Rubik’s® Cube we solve over and over again. We analyze data, satisfy customers, make budgets, have meetings, invent new things, and take enormous pride in feeding people and keeping them healthy. It’s complicated—and at times overwhelming—but not insurmountable.
So, what is difficult about our business? The common denominator behind everything we do: people. The conscious leader goes beyond the surface to figure out what makes them tick—their motivations, feelings, opinions, fears, hopes, and dreams.
How does a leader expand their capacity to understand people? The leadership gurus at present have discovered that empathy is the top secret. But how to develop empathy if our lives are stuck on the rinse-and-repeat button?
Travel outside the USA…experience different cultures, different food, opposing viewpoints, people who don’t look or sound like we do, and ancient places that fill us with wonder about societies of the past. Travel tests our ability to maneuver the unfamiliar and adapt to people outside our comfort zone. Isn’t that what defines empathy? The ability to hold others’ uniqueness inside ourselves without making them wrong or being uneasy.
Research shows that only a third of American adults say they have a valid and unexpired U.S. passport (37 percent)—about the same percentage as those who have never had a passport at all (38 percent). It’s difficult to expand empathy if all we ever experience is our own echo chamber.
Business isn’t impersonal. It is highly personal and emotional. Rather than always solely relying on data to make decisions, we can learn to trust gut instincts and our intuition about others. We can open our minds to different ways of thinking, new possibilities, and new ways to form meaningful connections.
According to Vistage research, the average Chief Executive Officer spends 72 percent of their time in meetings and attends an average of 37 meetings per week.
Motion is not progress and being busy doesn’t make you important. An “open door policy” turns the leader into acting like a kind of counselor helping employees complete assignments and solve problems they need to work out on their own. At an extreme, people can turn the executive into a buddy of sorts to talk over the latest game, gossip about others, or otherwise take up valuable time.
In advertising, white space is simply the space that gives your eyes a place to rest and focus on the most important elements in front of you. While it may be tempting to fill up all available space with lots of information to showcase a product, it has been shown that doing so actually has the opposite effect. Our brains become overwhelmed instead and simply stop taking in information.
The same phenomena occurs in the everyday work life of executives. They have lost control of their time and the space needed for strategic thinking about crucial business priorities—people and the future.
What is the solution? Block out 2–3 hours every week for yourself to think about your own effectiveness, a direct report of who needs coaching, the next possible growth opportunity for the company, and the deeper purpose of the business.
No disruptions.
No meetings.
No calls.
No people asking for “just a minute of your time.”
Just alone time to reflect on others, your effectiveness as a leader, and the path ahead.
“The conscious leader goes beyond the surface to figure out what makes them [people] tick—their motivations, feelings, opinions, fears, hopes, and dreams.”
The higher a leader moves in an organization, the more they risk being out of touch with what’s really going on. But more importantly, they miss ideas and insights other than their own that might enhance the business. So:
Leadership lives and breathes in different ways for each of us—but one thing is consistent. Leadership is an art, not just a measurement. Leadership is a way of being that shapes how we show up—the deep and lasting impact we have and how we help others, not just ourselves. 
