Being a leader always reminds me of an old movie, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The workload is enormous, the goal is far away, and even though there are supporters, family members, friends with whom you can share problems, somehow you are still alone. Alone, because those around you have usually not experienced for themselves how much responsibility there is, how big the burden is, despite good intentions and the desire to help, it is not the same as talking to people who are sitting in the same sauce.
I first realized the value of this during a leadership training. I was very young with little experience, when the labor market was turning from supply to demand, and the bargaining position of the local trade union and, accordingly, its negotiating style changed drastically. There was the interest of the corporate, the interests and demands of the workers, there was the interest of the plant itself, which was somewhere halfway between the former two, and I was in the middle who was looking very much for a compromise that was economically okay and that would not cause me to be lynched on a dark evening on the way home.
It was a tense period, I thought a lot, analyzed it, and talked many times with people close to me about it, but I found little understanding, because in the basic setup of "there is the boss and there are the others", they were all on the other side of the barricade in their own organizations. Either they didn't understand my suggestions, or they didn't feel why a good step is so important for the organization, why the given issue needs to be analyzed so deeply.
Then I signed up for a leadership training session, and at the dinner table I sat with an older gentleman with 30 years more leadership experience and he started talking about his problems with the union. That was it. Wow...I'M NOT ALONE...
When larger companies bring together people with the same function at regional level, it is not necessarily the setting of annual indicators that brings the greatest benefit, but the fact that they can finally talk to someone who is struggling with the same things under similar conditions. And this is extremely important, to share the pain and get support and ideas.
And for this reason, it is also important that if we cannot rely on such a regional team, we should look for trainings, forums, and mentors with whom we feel that they understand our problems and that we are not alone. Sometimes it's enough to joke things off and stress goes out, but it's also good to have someone to brainstorm, organize and discuss together. Because he knows what we're talking about, he's in it.
Do you have someone to talk to if everything is simply too much and the mess is big?
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