Would I follow me?

Would I follow me?

Now that’s an interesting question. Would I follow me? As a leader, there is some value in stopping from time to time and considering how we are doing our leadership and how this is being perceived and experienced by others.

It’s interesting isn’t it, we can all do the exercise of identifying who our best leader was or is in our career and who was our worst. The best is the leader we enjoyed working with and we can list all of their attributes that got the best out of us, gave us access to great projects, people, or places. They were the leader we worked ‘with’ not ‘for’.

Equally, when we think about our worst leader, it enables us to come up with another list of attributes that we didn’t enjoy and often, we try to do the complete opposite of those things in our own leadership. What’s interesting about that is, if you think of the choices you could take as positions on a compass, there are actually 359 other choices we could have made but we often do a 180-degree shift and do the complete opposite. Could we have made a different choice and got a better outcome? Something to think about.

Identifying our best and worst leaders is not a process to make them wrong and us right, but more of an opportunity to figure out what we made those experiences mean to us. When we experience something and apply meaning to it, we encode that as a ‘reality’ and store that away to use as a reference point for another time.

So, instead of focusing on them, how would it be if we spent time focusing on how these best and worst leaders provided us with opportunities to design our own leadership?

In order to understand how we can shift the dial on the way we impact others with our leadership – I call this our outer game – we need to have a greater awareness of how we are playing our ‘inner game’. Often, this was what we thought our ‘worst’ leader(s) were missing – that higher level of self-awareness. But how self-aware are we ourselves? No really, do we fully understand how we are playing our inner game?

Purpose

What is our purpose for being a leader? Simon Sinek uses the Golden Circle as a way for an organisation to unpack and understand it’s ‘why’ for being. We can also use this concept for ourselves so we can try to get to the core of our reason for wanting to be a leader – our purpose. Patrick Lencioni in his latest book The Motive also gets us to consider our motive or reason for wanting to be a leader and he suggests that there are typically two camps of leaders. Those who lead to feed their ego (status, power, etc) and then those who lead to be ‘of service’ and therefore see leadership as a position of privilege to be of service to others. A big part of discovering our purpose for being a leader is being clear on our intentions and being true to those.

Passion

As a leader, it’s useful if we are clear on what we are passionate about. What do we find motivating and how can we use that to fuel our purpose for being a leader? By being clear on the things we are passionate about, we are in a better position to positively impact those around us. We do need to be a little careful though as sometimes we can be so passionate about something that we can walk around with this big ole hammer and suddenly everything becomes a nail. It can be useful to ‘check-in’ as to the behaviours we use when we are passionate about something, so we don’t overuse that muscle and have it de-rail us.

Performance

When we understand our purpose and use passion to positively impact others, we find our own performance is packed with integrity. Brene Brown defines integrity as “choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.” A good question to ask ourselves here is, has there ever been a time I did something because it was the ‘politically savvy’ thing to do and therefore I would ‘fit in’ and not rock the boat? If the answer to that is yes, then we may have chosen to act without integrity in that moment. The downside to that, of course, is we find it difficult to be congruent and authentic if we are not acting with integrity. This is often driven by fear – the fear of rejection. Leaders may try and ‘fit in’ for so long but it’s often unsustainable and they will move on from an organisation or a leader if they don’t feel they can be congruent.

So, coming back to our original question, ‘would I follow me?’ If we are clear on our purpose, passion and performance and we can come from a place of service when we lead then the answer might be ‘yes’. The times we may come up with a ‘no’ could be those times when our intention, impact and integrity have been a bit out of whack. If we are honest, we have all had those times, those experiences when, on reflection, we wished things had gone differently. And yes we can hang onto the ‘it takes two to tango’ etc. but if we truly want to achieve better results we need to focus on that which we can control and do something about our own ‘inner game’. Being intentional around:

·        what you stand for

·        what is important to you as a leader

·        acting with integrity

This means the impact you make is something others will follow but most importantly, is something that feels natural and congruent to you. Our leadership becomes a bit like wearing a comfy sweater, it just feels right!

If this were easy stuff to do then everyone would be doing it! But, if you are a leader who would like to achieve more personally and with your team by understanding your inner game, then I would love to talk with you.

Lead with impact,