TOO MANY BOSSES, TOO FEW LEADERS: SELF AND TEAM LEADERSHIP

RAJEEV PESHAWARIA

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PART 1: SELF AND TEAM LEADERSHIP

1.1           ENERGIZE The Self: Self-Leadership

                Lead yourself to lead others

One of the biggest reasons for abundance of poor or mediocre leaders is that people accept leadership positions for the wrong reasons.  Leadership needs a purpose bigger than self-interest.  People, who go into leadership position without fully understanding this, will make terrible bosses.

Leadership is like parenting.  The rewards need to be in the journey.  Leadership is about creating a future that is better than the present.  Without clarity of personal purpose, it is virtually impossible to imagine a better future.  Your purpose and values define your leadership identity and give you the energy you need to stay the course.  Leadership is about the long haul, and you need lasting sources of energy.

There is no shortcut formula to becoming a better leader.  The only way to define your purpose and values is to ask yourself some tough questions about purpose and values that will help you put things in perspective.  To determine the purpose, we need to make a brutal honest assessment of what we really want.  Clarity on what is important to you has a direct bearing on one of the most common challenges of living the corporate existence.

The important thing to get clear is: do you want to be a leader at all or not.  Leading others is not better or worse than self-leadership.  It is a preference and requires a different orientation.  To lead others, you must be a team player.  Most organization try to teach the value of teamwork, but like leadership, teamwork cannot be taught.  Visualizing a better future is the basic prerequisite of leadership.

You become a leader when

You move from problem solving to

Purpose finding

-Robert Quinn, author of Deep Change-

In business, it is easy to find many managers and bosses who are excellent problem solvers and great at follow-through.  Only a few challenge that status quo and visualize a new and different future.  Even fewer invite their team to participate in brain-storming sessions about how to challenge conventional wisdom and create something different.  Good leaders have a natural tendency to question the status quo.

Purpose defines what you want to create, and values define how you will create it.  Values determine your emotions, and the energy created by emotions in turn produces great performance.  Emotional energy can be positive or negative.  Positive emotional energy produces memorable great performances, whereas negative emotional energy produces regrettable performance and behaviour.  Great leaders understand that prerequisite to managing emotions is having clarity about values.

Emotions happen when there is a match or mismatch between your deeply held values and the situation at hand.  Learn how to recognize your emotions as you experience them, and to understand what is triggering them.  Studies have shown that emotional energy is 4 times more powerful than rational energy.  Great leaders understand the power of emotion, and are able to harness it to motivate people to action.  They do so by appealing to values.

One of the most powerful developmental experiences is called ‘Personal Best’.  When emotions produced negative impulses, it will prevent us from being at our personal best.  So, think about how you want others to experience you.  The more you think about how you want to portray yourself, the cleared you get about your values.

Great leaders have clarity about their values and they also have the courage to act according to them.  The very essence of leadership is the ability to stay the course despite stiff opposition, because leaders succeed in spite of, not because of, their environment.  Behaving in accordance with stated values is the key.  Real leaders differentiate themselves by their actions, not their words.

There is a very thin line between sticking to your purpose and values, and being stubborn.  While leaders must be prepared to act accordingly to their values, and be ready to be in the game for the long haul, they must also keep an open mind and be prepared to change their views as they receive new information.

There is a strong link between emotions and performance.  High performance is a function of emotional energy.  To understand and recognize your emotions, you need to know your values.  Once you have clarified your values, you need to better understand situations that cause you to feel emotions.  In order to create a better future, leaders need energy in abundance.  Clarity about purpose and values are the only lasting source of leadership energy.

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 to be continued.....