|
If you cannot see this here, you can view it at http://www.peopleempowered.com.au/newsletters |
|
|
|
|
Newsletter September 14, 2011. Personal Leadership - What is it? |
|
The best leaders and managers will all acknowledge that the buck stops with them. They accept responsibility for what happens in their organisation.   Maree Harris. PhD.  |
|
Personal Leadership - What is it?
If we are to lead others, we first need to be able to lead ourselves. This is about “Personal Leadership” or what some would call “Self-Leadership”. It fits very well with the work I do on soft skills because they are the very skills that enable it. Many of us have experienced working with leaders who are trying to run a very busy and complex organisation but whose personal lives are publicly in crisis. The decisions they make seem to go from bad to worse and every one of them is on view. They are not in control of their lives and it is obvious to everyone. These leaders are struggling to lead themselves, let alone their organisation. There’s the leader though in a similar organisation who lost a child in a car accident 12 months previous and now has another with a terminal illness. His crisis is contained. It is not obvious in his day to day engagement with his people. He is focussed on the key issues for his organisation. He is personally in charge of his emotions which must be overwhelming at times. He is inspirational to his staff in his courage and resilience. He is very tuned in to his people. This is someone with well developed personal leadership skills. There’s also the leaders who lose it when something goes wrong in the organisation, or a mistake is made. They blame and criticize their people. They rant, even scream, at them. They project their fears, anxieties and overwhelm on to their people. They do not have the skills to personally lead them through that experience to a constructive outcome. On the other hand, there’s the leaders who call their people together and calmly announce what has happened. They state their concern and detail the potential repercussions very directly but without blame or criticism. They share responsibility for the situation – “the buck stops with me”. Their emotions about the situation are contained and expressed in a constructive way. They pro-actively take control and call on their people to work with them to remedy the situation. They present a plan to their people for how the organisation will move forward, or, demonstrating trust in their people, they ask them for ideas about how they could do that. They motivate their people by acting in a resilient way assuring them that together the organisation will overcome this situation. These leaders have excellent personal leadership skills. We’ve tended to think of leadership in terms of a set of skills that bring about change, provide a vision or shape the future of something “out there” – an organisation, a project, a society or community. Yet leadership in the first instance is about something “in here” – inside people. We have to first of all be able to lead ourselves, so we can lead others who can lead the world. So we can all stop and ask ourselves.
These will be interpersonal, communication or people skills – soft skills. They are the skills which, when well developed, help us confidently manage every situation we face, build great relationships of trust with people and which turn us into people of influence with an enhanced professional profile and reputation. Our technical skills may be the skills that get us our job. Our soft skills are those that see us advance and get the promotions. They are also skills which very much affect the bottom line of any organisation.
Are You Putting A Dent In The Universe? It was Steve Jobs, the recently retired founder and CEO of Apple, who said: “We are here to put a dent in the universe.” He has certainly done that. Many would feel that no one can do it like him. He has turned Apple into the most successful company in the world at the present time. Reading this I found myself asking:
Yes, I do, and I am driven by three key motivators.
It is hard, dedicated work that takes time and commitment, and maybe a bit (or a lot) of passion. Setting Priorities for Our Lives is A Good Starting Point. What did you do with the first 3 hours of today? How did you spend that time? Was it productive? Was it wasted? How could you have used it better? How are you feeling now about this day given the way you have started it? The way we begin our day has a significant impact on how that day progresses. If we lurch into it without knowing what we are going to do from one 15 minutes to the next, then we will tend to be very unproductive. At the end of the day we are left with a feeling that we have achieved nothing much of importance. On the other hand if the night before, we took time to focus ourselves and to plan out the next day, we will start that day very differently. Planning at the end of the day, especially if it is just before we retire, we activate our subconscious mind, so the experts say, to register our commitments for the next day. We are far more likely to begin the day very focussed. Try it and see if it works. We waste no time becoming productive and achieving results at the beginning of the day. One of the greatest challenges to managing our day is the unpredictability of life and work today. We can start the day with clarity and a focus on what is important for us to achieve that day and then something happens from left field, or we find ourselves with dozens of “spot fires” that we need to put out. Our carefully planned day is turned on its head. It is very easy then to give up on trying to achieve what’s important to us and just surrender to the stream of “Not Important but Urgent” activities in organisational life. It doesn’t have to be that way, however. We can develop the personal leadership skills, the soft skills, that will resource us to stay focussed and be pro-active about what is important to us – even in the midst of multiple demands on our time from all sides. (If you missed my Monday Motivation on Stephen Covey’s time management quadrant for setting priorities of which “Not Important but Urgent” is one quadrant, then you can check it out here.) Many people get to work and spend the first few hours doing a whole lot of little things “to get them out of the way”. Most of these things will make no significant difference to their work or their business if they didn’t get done. What often happens as well is that they never get to what is important. At the end of the day they then feel they’ve been very unproductive and have achieved nothing. A Good Strategy. A good strategy that I use myself and other colleagues have found very helpful is to set your key important priority for the day – just one. Whatever distractions come your way, you attend to them, but you always come back to that priority. You are absolutely committed to completing it, no matter what. If, at the end of the day, that is all you have done you will have a great sense of achievement. So the challenge is to work out how you want to put a dent in the universe, what will get in the way and take hold of it, THEN JUST MAKE A START!
|