opinion

Who do you want to be?

What kind of leader are you? And what kind of leader do you want to be? What’s the style that gets you best results and feels right to you?

Leadership isn’t just a mechanical process. It’s not a series of steps or something you can learn from a manual. On the contrary it’s very much about who you are, the choices you make, your personal style, the way you relate to people around you and your place in your organisational system.

Leadership is about who you are

Who you are – what and who you believe to be important, what energises you, what motivates you at a deep level, the personal experiences you’ve come from, and how you’ve translated them into what’s meaningful for you: all this shapes the kind of leader you are. If you believe process and facts to be a priority, you’ll make different choices from a leader who believes people’s feelings and sense of belonging are a priority. If being popular matters to you you’ll make different decisions from a leader who takes a competitive approach.

Translating past experiences into present style

How you relate to the experiences of your past and the creation of your present fundamentally influences who you are as a leader. From your past you’ll have learnt not only what makes a good leader in your context but also what behaviours are the ‘right’ behaviours and whose opinion matters: we all grew up in environments where certain behaviours attracted approval and positive feedback, and other behaviours meant either we wouldn’t get positive attention or we might have been ignored altogether.

Maybe in your family it was expected that a younger sibling shouldn’t be especially respected, hard work was praised, and getting things wrong was frowned on. These expectations translate themselves into leadership behaviours: the degree of respect for junior people, the importance you attach to learning, the place of collaborative or autocratic decision-making, your capacity to envision and communicate a bold future.

Decisions, attitudes and beliefs

And maybe you’ve decided – consciously or unconsciously – that you definitely do, or definitely don’t, want to replicate the attitudes and beliefs of a role model or someone else close to you.

The beliefs and attitudes, and even the assumptions, that you’re loyal to, both knowingly and unknowingly, shape your leadership style.

Your purpose – and the deal you expect

You may be unclear – or you may be crystal clear – about your driving purpose. Your purpose and the values that underpin it will account for where you aim for in the leadership of your team.

So too will your expectations of the balance between what you give in your career and what you’ll get in return, to whom you give and from whom you receive, the way you communicate your message and how you interpret the messages that come back.

A clearer view after a break

When you return to work after a break – the Christmas and New Year holidays and the summer holidays are the most obvious examples – your mind is likely to be fresher and you’re more likely to take a more balanced perspective than when you’re in the thick of the pressure and imperatives that govern everyday normal life.

What messages have bubbled to the surface for you, and what steps are you now taking to act on those messages, to become the kind of leader you want to be and to shape the career you really want?

Photo by Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig via Compfight

What kind of leader do you want to be?

What kind of leader are you? And what kind of leader do you want to be? What’s the style that gets you best results and feels right to you? When you return to work after a break you may have a more balanced perspective than when you’re in the thick of the pressure. What are you doing to act on the messages that are now clear to you, to become the kind of leader you want to be and to shape the career you really want?

From peers to direct reports: the senior promotion

When leaders are promoted - and have focused great effort on actually getting the job - there's a risk of not putting enough effort, or not early enough, into making a success of the role once they’re in it. There may be new leadership skills to master - and one of the biggest challenges is to develop new relationships as leader with people who have previously been their peers.

Women, careers and personal safety

Senior women at work, especially those working part-time, may not be as safe as they would like. They need to develop career resilience: a flexibility in being prepared for – and handling - the unexpected, and learning from tough experiences so as to feel more resourced for the path ahead.

Identity and authenticity

For some people change appears unsafe because they fear they'll no longer be who they are. However, it's not behaviour or thinking patterns that define who we are. What inherently and uniquely defines ‘self’ are our deeply held (and possibly unconsciously-held) values, our natural talents, and what we need from our environments if we are to thrive. We each need to understand our true place in the various sets of relationships that comprise our lives - in other words, our systems. Constellations can help.

Resilience and transition: an intimate connection

The relevance of resilience to what can be the challenging process of transition is striking. Leaders have change imposed upon them through, for example, merger or acquisition, or they may be moving into new roles, to new organisations, new cultures, or new countries. During these transitions they need to rediscover their internal resources and call on (or build) fresh sources of resilience. The path to (re-)building resilience can be eased by written narrative and (re-)discovering purpose and meaning.

Building organisational wellbeing

A meaningful approach to organisational wellbeing will go significantly beyond tactics and process. Building and nurturing wellbeing has to be a way of being (albeit complemented by a set of actions) if it is to bring any significant results. It is part of the organisational culture – how people are with each other. Wellbeing is everyone’s issue: it is systemic.

The challenge of leadership: what’s needed now?

The recent Sadler Heath event 'What's Needed Now?' - focused on an 'exploration of listening for the right thing to do' - highlighted big themes for me in relation to the role of leadership, responsibility, dialogue, and connection with the system.

Wellbeing: a direct impact on the bottom line

Organisations with high levels of wellbeing retain their people and in many other ways too, profitability, efficiency and effectiveness increase as wellbeing increases. Positivity breeds positivity. A sense of purpose – which gives meaning to an organisation’s work and the work of its employees – is a critical factor in the building and sustaining of wellbeing.

Leading across Cultures

To work effectively with difference, the starting point is to understand and be aware of oneself: behaviours, emotions, interpretations, assumptions, and the impact of assumptions. It means taking a holistic view, being curious, and holding back from making judgments of the worth of this or that person, or from jumping to conclusions. Leaders who are culturally aware create sub-cultures of greater trust, more effective communication, healthier relationships and leadership that releases infinitely more potential.

Factors in managing the executive career

Executives who have taken their careers in hand in a holistic sense, thinking ‘whole-life’ rather than simply in terms of the next apparently logical step on the ladder, are more likely to enjoy career longevity and deliver the fullest value for themselves and their organisations. The Wittenberg Career Coaching Model weaves together multiple factors within multiple perspectives to take account of this ‘whole-life’ approach.

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