One of the biggest problems in leadership today is that leaders aren’t having enough conversations about themselves. People often talk about how you have to be strong and know everything to be able to lead people powerfully, and as a result, leaders are always having conversations around how to fix problems, how to lead people, and how to create vision, but rarely are they talking about themselves in the same way. Leaders don’t generally consider their individual weaknesses or vulnerabilities, and this leads to ineffective leadership.
Becoming an effective leader is not a one-size-fits-all process; in fact, leadership necessitates individuality. However, we can all develop ourselves into better leaders by following a few guiding principles of leadership. Read on to learn what these principles are, and how you can apply them in your own leadership.
1. Develop your being, not your skills
I was speaking to a colleague recently about the conversations leaders aren’t having, and he said something interesting about his own leadership journey I’d like to share with you. While talking about his transition from his previous career into the coaching world, he said, “I didn’t realize, heading into this new career path, that I would actually have to work on myself so much. I expected to do some training, and I came into it with the mindset that I would learn new things and then model them for others, but I didn’t expect the level of self-reflection that was actually required of me.”
It’s interesting to see this mirrored in our own work as well; for example, we’ve now served about 10 people in two different cohorts with our 8 week program, and a piece of feedback I’ve often received from participants is that they’ve realized they don’t take time to reflect on themselves in their regular life. It’s just not something that we’re shown as a possibility or as something we should pay attention to.
Another piece of feedback we’ve received from people who participate in our program is that they came into the program wanting skills, processes, and tactics to become great leaders, but they didn’t realize the work they needed to do on themselves as people. This is because our program really creates a distinction between the development of the leader – either one who is a leader or who will be a leader – and the development of skills, the latter of which are what most people focus on in leadership work.
If I were to put a headline on the work that we’ve been doing in this 8 week leadership challenge, it’s to invest in the human that’s in front of us, and the development of their being as a human. The skill-based work still happens, of course, but the focus of our work is on the human.
2. Find your own unique leadership style
Successful leader development focuses on the person, not their skills. We all want tools, skills, and fixes to use in our businesses and our lives, but the core of the work, and the most powerful part of the work, is the development of the leader.
Think about it this way: anyone can learn skills, but who you’ll be when you apply these skills is what makes the difference between you and someone else. You can practice certain skills and become great at them, but if your being is not completely aligned, those skills are not going to have as large an impact. That’s why who we’re being, rather than what we’re doing, is the most important aspect of leadership. We can’t just copy other leaders around us. In our normal lives, we often adopt the traits we admire of those closest to us – our partners, our families, and our friends. But when it comes to our leadership, we need to develop our own art and our own style of leadership that is authentic to us.
So, how can we develop our unique style? It’s all about allowing someone to figure out the answers for themselves. You don’t want to just give them a recipe on “how to be a leader” – you need to ask them the large-scale, open-ended questions about themselves and their leadership and allow them to answer these questions without interference. The whole idea is to not allow your own style or sense of being to influence theirs; otherwise, they cannot develop a truly authentic leadership style.
3. Get comfortable with your power and your leadership style
It’s powerful to create a space where someone can see themselves, and also realize what others see and experience when they’re in the room with them. It’s gratifying and affirming, but it’s also uncomfortable. And that discomfort is interesting because it stems from different places.
The two main sources of discomfort we may experience during leadership work are: the judgments and assessments we make about ourselves, and the lack of acknowledgment we give ourselves, or allow ourselves to receive from others. A lot of people tend to gravitate towards feelings of skepticism or cynicism in the face of flattery, not really believing that we are doing good work when someone tells us we are, which can make it uncomfortable to do the work. We’re not used to receiving flattery, ro compliments, and we don’t really know how to internalize that praise – or provide that praise to others, either. We have to practice being comfortable with receiving acknowledgment and praise from others, and providing it to others, in order to become better leaders.
It’s hard for us to own our accomplishments and the elements that make up our being, because we’ve been taught that it’s arrogant, or not humble. We need to spend the time in a safe space to become more comfortable with ourselves and build our confidence.
4. Slow down
We must take time to slow down, be present, and become more aware of what’s going on around us. In fact, one of the main values of our eight week program is the 90 minute space we carve out once a week for our participants to slow down, pause, and reflect.
The conversation that leaders are so often having is, “How can I go faster? How can I get more done?” Even though slow-paced practices like meditation have recently taken on a much more prominent role in professional life, the conversation still isn’t “How can I slow down and create more space in my leadership?” This conversation about slowing down must become a priority for leaders, or we risk moving through spaces too quickly without providing breathing room for our leadership to grow and truly impact others.
The other important part of allowing ourselves space to slow down is, when we check in with ourselves and ask, “How am I doing”, we can actually answer this properly. We can really take a minute to think about it and investigate the underlying questions, which are: what am I present with right now? What am I not fully attuned to? Where are my distractions?
There’s so much more richness and depth to the conversation if we take ourselves off of autopilot and actually try to answer the question honestly, rather than defaulting to “I’m doing fine”.
5. Take full ownership
The natural approach to leadership is often the perspective that things are happening to us. We don’t take full ownership of our situations, instead defaulting to the victim mentality. As leaders, we need to stop and ask, is this really true? Can I choose another path that will allow me to be fully responsible for my experience at this moment?
It takes a while to learn how to drop this victim mentality and become more self aware. The most important thing to understand is that taking full ownership is a way to take our power back as leaders. It’s often difficult because we think that it makes us faulty people, or that we will have to take the blame for wrongdoings, even if they are not our fault. But taking ownership is not the same as taking blame. It’s understanding how to move forward and respond to your environment in a powerful and healthy way, regardless of who has caused which issues.
Next time you find yourself in a difficult situation, ask yourself, what kind of experience do I want to have? We can choose what our intention is, we can choose how we want to experience situations, and we can choose what we will do about them. Taking full ownership is your ticket to accessing power.
Here is a leadership exercise: when in a difficult situation, take a moment to categorize and listen to each one of your own complaints about the situation. Then take the top one or two complaints and add the words “because I want it” to the end of the complaint.
Sit with the idea that the complaint exists because you want it to. This will change your perspective. Sometimes, you don’t even have to change anything about the circumstances, but you can still choose to receive the situation however you want.
We’re all leaders, experiencing life moment by moment and leading ourselves to make the right decisions. In fact, every single moment is an opportunity to lead.
This is a very empowering place to come from, to be able to make the shift from “this is happening to me” to “I’m in a place of choice and cause in this situation, if nothing else in how I respond and react to others.”
There is also a significant impact on those around you that occurs when you begin taking full ownership in leadership roles. When people see us taking full responsibility for a situation, even if another person is the one who made a mistake, it impacts them. There is transformational power enacted on those who are following us, and it makes us stronger leaders, both in their eyes and in our own. Full ownership transforms how we show up as a leader, and it changes the potential impact we can have on others.
6. Face your fears
Fear has an interesting role to play in our leadership. For most people, the automatic response to fear is avoidance. We don’t take responsibility for the situation causing us fear, and we blame others for putting us in these situations.
Another response we often encounter when faced with fear is overthinking. We begin overthinking anytime we are faced with a choice that includes some element of an unknown outcome, because our fear gets in the way. When we can’t clearly see the path or the outcome, we can’t make informed decisions – our brain is wired not to want to do things if we can’t foresee how it will end. To avoid this, try to get into the practice of not second-guessing yourself. Bypass this thinking stage in your brain, and go ahead with your questions and responses. Sometimes, it’s better to think less.
If you are constantly faced with situations of potential fear and uncertainty, as is often the case for those in leadership positions, it can be helpful to prioritize and understand your commitments. Recognizing what matters most to you, and how you can achieve those commitments through your decisions, helps to drive out fear. Therefore, in order to be an effective leader, you need to get clear on what your highest commitment is, for your life, family, and for you. Reminding yourself of those commitments, your highest callings, is important because, without that reminder, the fear almost always overwhelms you.
I try to use this in my own life and my own leadership. Even when I have a strong understanding of – and connection to – the commitments in my life, fear still gets the best of me sometimes. However, over the years this has become less and less of a factor.
This idea of managing our commitments is how we help support our leaders in a powerful way: by helping them to understand what they’re fully committed to. From that place, the right choice becomes much clearer. It doesn’t necessarily become easier, but it is clearer.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line of leader development is that, in order to become effective leaders, we must truly look at ourselves, rather than looking at the process or the path to what we want to achieve. You have to understand how your being moves you through life, and what things provide you with a sense of power, with more ease, and with more impact.
The practice of awareness, acknowledgment, and growth is ongoing. It doesn’t end in 8 weeks, there’s no magic ticket. You won’t feel comfortable, confident, and completely affirmed in who you are and how you lead just by completing this program. But you can get started. So, how can our clients continually work that muscle, once they’ve broken the surface of this leadership work? It starts with intentional awareness, and the continual practice of noticing our being and our impact. Be present with your essence and realize your intentions in each moment. If you are aware of yourself as a leader, you can choose, in each moment, where you come from and what your impact is.
I had someone mention to me once that, before participating in our program, they never stopped to think about some of the questions we ask, like “Who am I”, and “How do I show up as a leader?” In our regular lives, these types of self-searching questions are not portrayed as something we need to pay attention to, and I believe this is detrimental to many leaders’ potential for success and impact.
It really comes down to having those conversations about how we show up in life, how we operate, who we want to be, and what our blind spots are. This is what we work on in our 8 week challenge: helping people find their unique voice to enable them to express themselves in the world.