The Influences to direct, motivate, and enable others to achieve a common goal, in line with the group’s values.
From its most narrow perspective, a leader is someone who is in a leadership position with direct reports. We prefer to look at leadership as a set of behaviours that is applicable to everyone — leaders, followers, and individual contributors — because, as the research demonstrates, even to perform your own work effectively, it starts with leading yourself. That leads us to Leadership Principle #1.
To Lead Others Effectively Starts With Leading Yourself.
The Inner Game of Leadership drives the Outer Game of Success: Individual Productivity, Team Performance, and Organizational Profitability. That is the Chain of Impact, which allows you and your organization to fulfill your purpose, deliver on your promises, and ultimately to create prosperity.
Master who you are by understanding your beliefs, values, and traits. Your identity forms the core of your leadership style.
a. Beliefs:
The fundamental ideas and concepts that you know to be true. This is what gives your life meaning and drives your purpose. This is the WHY of your leadership.
b. Values:
This is the HOW of your leadership. Because of what is important to you, how you show up and interact with life events and the people in it.
c. Traits:
This is the WHAT of your leadership, where things become tangible. What other people see you do and hear you say.
Master how you think and feel by enhancing your sense-making, emotional intelligence, and ability to learn from experience.
a. Sense-Making:
Based on how you see the world, the information that you take in. Understand that you all have bias, some of it innate and some of it learned. The key is to make these biases as conscious as possible so you have a realistic appreciation of the lenses through which you see the world.
b. Emotional Intelligence:
This has a comprehensive framework that boils down to the awareness and management of your own emotions and the same for how you deal with others on the emotional plane.
c. Learning:
Learning is a muscle, you can learn how to learn. you favour the Adult or Experiential Learning cycle with theory, reflection, experimentation, and experience phases.
Master how you execute by improving your decision-making, accountability, and resilience. These skills ensure you can lead effectively in any situation.
a. Decision-Making:
The key to proper decision-making is understanding what problem you are trying to solve (sense-making) and then using the appropriate decision-making approach based on the situation.
b. Accountability:
This is about ownership and agency: owning the situation and the problem (even if you didn’t cause it), having the agency to do something about it and not be a victim of circumstance, and lastly owning the outcome both good and bad.
c. Resilience:
The ability to withstand, adapt to, recover from, and even get stronger in the face of adversity. This means being both tough and flexible in terms of body, mind, heart and soul along with having strong and meaningful relationships.
Knowing yourself does not come automatically. It takes work. Hard work. You have to put in the repetitions to gain that self-awareness.
One tool to increase that self-awareness is the Johari Window. The Johari Window is a framework used to improve self-awareness, interpersonal communication, group dynamics, and personal development. Its model is visually represented as a four-pane window, with each pane representing different parts of you as seen by yourself and others.
Most People’s Leadership is Stuck at the Level of Their Inner Game.
This quote is courtesy of Anderson & Adams who wrote the book Mastering Leadership. This isn’t just a neat sound bite, their extensive research and data collection led them to this conclusion. In other words, how well you lead directly in teams and how well you lead more indirectly in organizations is limited by how well you can lead yourself. This is the Chain of Impact. The following graphic of the 3-Band Lead-O-Meter allows you to visualize this concept with the dotted line emanating from the Leadership-of-Self needle.
The Lead-O-Meter colour scheme, that spans the rainbow, is meant to convey that it's a gradual progression through the 4 zones without hard boundaries.
This framework is underpinned by Dr. Robert Kegan's work on the Stages of Adult Development with the Lead-O-Meter zones 1-4 roughly analogous to his Stages 2-5. Most people mature to a certain extent over the years. However, they reach a point where that progression stops unless significant effort is applied to continue growing as a leader. Statistically, less than half of the adult population scores greater than 50 with most coming in between 40 and 60.
The Lead-O-Meter is a powerful tool designed to measure your Leadership-of-Self.
Take the 55-question assessment to discover your strengths and areas for improvement.
