Your Personal Leadership

What do leadership and your smartphone have in common? The answer may surprise you. Take note how many times you look at your phone in a day. It’s calling your attention with each ding and beep. You run an errand, and check for emails as you go. You grab a coffee from the break room and pull out your phone to see an incoming text. You run out to grab a bite to eat and while in line, check the twitter feed. And you haven’t even left the office yet. In fact, people check their phones 150 times a day, according to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s annual Internet Trends report.

Now that we’ve shed some light on our lack of awareness of smartphone use, let’s look at your leadership style. This is a critical piece of how you perform on the job, who you are and how you relate to colleagues, friends and family. Are you aware of your leadership style? Can you identify right now what it is about your leadership that is most effective?

Awareness is powerful, and as a leader bringing awareness to why you act, respond, and communicate the way you do gives you much more control over your own actions. Equally important, becoming aware of your own strengths and weaknesses gives you leverage to be more aware of others’ abilities and capabilities and opens the door to how you can mobilize them to change, tackle tough challenges, and make the difference.

Too often our time is consumed with the day-to-day functions of work and life — managing problems, employees, time. We frequently find ourselves focused only on the situation right in front of us. We are reacting to issues and problems that fall on our path, and often responding in an unconscious manner out of ingrained habits.

How much better could we be if we brought awareness into the picture? Consider taking some time, some significant time, to answer for yourself the following questions.

1. When did you first realize you were a leader? What were you doing? What role has that experience played in who you are as a leader today? When you are doing something to improve your people you are leading.
2. What are your aces? Are they reflected in what you do each day? To really flush out the answers to these questions, you may want to ask several close colleagues and even friends or family members when they have seen you at your best. The late management guru Peter Drucker wrote, “The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of every individual.” How better can we accomplish this goal when we are first aware of our own aces.
3. What is your Achilles heel – not your weaknesses, but that which is holding you back?
4. What is your mindset? Are you looking for the problem, or are you focused on what is going right?

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Henry Thoreau [Journal, 5 August 1851]

When you are aware of how you lead and what others look for in you, you can better use these qualities to mobilize and build hope. Recognizing the difference between managing and leading (they are complimentary and related) and knowing what role to play when builds trust and lets people know they can rely on you, and that you care for them.

It is hard work to build awareness of your leadership style. But leading with intention is a critical part to becoming a better leader. Leadership is personal. Sit down with yourself, and have an honest conversation about what has brought you to the type of leader you are and want to become.