It Can Be Loney at the Top - But C-Suite Coaching Cards Can Help Join C-Suite Coach, Kim Randall and our very own Darren Smith, as they talk about support for C-Suite (executive-level managers). Face it, sometimes it gets lonely at the top, especially when everyone is rushing to you for support. Explore Kim's passion for delving into the human side of leaders, helping them to connect with who they are as a person as well as a leader. If you're a leader or want to offer support, make sure to check out this podcast. You Can Read the Full C-Suite Transcript Below: Darren A. Smith: Hello. You're at a podcast. Welcome to the world's stickiest learning. We're with Kim Randall and also Pudding who you're stroking there. Kim-Adele Randall: I am to try and get him to not join in. I think he might be the more vocal of the two of us this morning. Darren A. Smith: It's probably true. That's probably true. The title of our podcast is where Do C-Suites go to for support now? I'm joined by Kim, who is a C-Suite coach. Is that right? Kim-Adele Randall: It is. Darren A. Smith: OK, now in the nicest possible way. Kim, I'm going to ask you, why should we listen to you about this? Kim-Adele Randall: Great question, Darren. So I guess for me, I started off as in C-Suite and was there for a number of years. And then when I became a mum, I decided that I could have a bigger impact by coaching of the C-Suite leaders. Having been there and realised that it might be lonely at the top, but it's certainly not quiet. Everyone is looking to you for the answer. Everyone expects you to always be on your game. People forget that our cease suite leaders are people 1st and leaders second and we are all perfectly imperfect. We have things that go wrong in our lives. We don't always know the answer. Darren A. Smith: True. Kim-Adele Randall: We're not always feeling like we're firing on all cylinders and so if we can, when we understand the human side of that C-Suite, that was one of my passions as part of my purpose, which is how do we help those C-Suite leaders connect with who they are as a person as well as who they are as a leader and give them that support? Because no human being in the world can survive without support for long. And it's this way you think the phrase comes from lonely at the top. I think so, yeah. Because when you get to the top, you both from. From my own experience and also from, you know, coaching at hundreds of other C-Suite leaders, one of the things that is so common throughout is we all fear becoming irrelevant. Kim-Adele Randall: And when you get to the very top, you know that everybody wants your job. You're doing one of you, so there's nowhere to go. So actually all you are is hanging on for dear life until somebody comes to step into those shoes and that is that plays in, in their head. It's that, you know, am I still adding value? Am I still relevant? Am I still doing stuff? Cause where do you go for your help? You can't. If you have those moments of doubt, we all have them. You know, in Process syndrome hits us all at some point in our life, you kind of go well, where, where, where do I go? Darren A. Smith: True. True again. Kim-Adele Randall: So I'm having this moment of doubt and I can't go to my direct reports because they're one looking to me for support and equally looking for any element of weakness so that they might be able to take and I can't go to the board because they might doubt my confidence or credibility and therefore you know that might have ramifications. So where do I go in those moments? Where I need to get out of my own head and we all know that we all have blind spots for the reason we're blind to them. Kim-Adele Randall: So no amount of looking at ourselves in the mirror is going to highlight those blind spots. What we need is a sometimes a sounding board, sometimes a trusted advisor, sometimes just a safe space where I don't know if you've ever had these moments, Darren,
