‘Retire into yourself as much as possible. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one. People learn as they teach.’
Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher
In ancient Greece, the Oracle of Delphi was a major influence on people’s lives. Proud rulers, anxious to know what the future would hold for their empires, would take a trip to consult Apollo’s Oracle. Meeting an oracle was perceived as a life-changing experience, where the requestor would be given, most of the time, an ambiguous and somewhat cryptic answer.
The principle of an oracle was that it would guide enquirers so that they would become aligned with their destinies. Every answer could be found from within.
Over time, the oracle’s purpose evolved into one of learning how to be who you are. The more consciously you understand what is contained within you as an individual – your goodness and your badness – the better equipped you will be to go through life.
At the beginning of 2012, Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, challenged the ‘great man’ theory, declaring that trying to emulate other great leaders is the surest way to failure. The key to leadership, he asserts, is not emulation, nor having the perfect competences or leadership styles, nor even having the power or the title to lead, but merely being authentic and true to yourself in what you do.
Building your self-awareness, finding the essence of what makes you you and keeping your authenticity are keys to successful leadership. You can develop your self-awareness by examining the following questions:
Note that it might be helpful to keep the answers you give for the exercises included later in this chapter as they may be useful when you come to undertake the exercises in Chapter 4.
Self-awareness is your ability to understand how you feel and think. This knowledge is essential as it enables you to stay in tune with your emotions, understand and help your decision making process and develop authentic relationships with your team. After all, if you don’t know yourself, how can you lead yourself? If you can’t lead yourself, how can you lead others?
To acquire an adequate level of self-awareness, it is necessary to commit to yourself and work on understanding exactly who you are. It demands the development of sound self-questioning abilities, coupled with a proactive approach to the experience of leadership. Finally, it requires you to avidly request feedback and act on it. Taking time to reflect on your values, goals, your personal definition of success and how your actions relate to these is a necessary starting point for anyone who wants to lead.
To develop your self-awareness you must begin by looking inside yourself. The following questions are good starting points:
These should be looked at through the filter of, ‘What does this tell me about my ability to lead, to become a leader or differentiate?’ Let us look at each question in turn.
This is the most fundamental question. Identify the different elements that have influenced you and assess how they appear or translate in your behaviours and might be shaping who you are as a leader.
You can break this down by looking at different aspects, such as the following:
Your beliefs and value system are constructed out of a complex series of factors, including your upbringing, education and religion. These define you at moral and ethical levels. They represent the framework of what it is acceptable for you to do or be. They also frame your relationships with others and how you build respect and trust. (More on beliefs and values can be found in Chapter 6.)
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses is helpful in defining your current potential and forces you to think in terms of leveraging your strengths and compensating for your weaknesses.
The questions to focus on could be, but are not restricted to, these:
Assessing strengths and weaknesses also presents additional benefits. It acts as a training ground for you to assess others, ultimately developing your teambuilding and leading abilities while honing your delegation skills – in other words, what and to whom to delegate. It helps you to very quickly gauge your fit with or appetite for a particular position and highlights how you can differentiate to be more successful. Ultimately, it will buff up your career management skills (for more on this, see Chapter 6).
Working on your self-awareness can be a difficult exercise, so consider hiring a personal development coach. Some organisations will even offer coaching sessions to their top performers, identified talents or executives. A professional coach will help facilitate the change required and answer any questions or doubts you may have. Coaching can crystallise your responsibilities and commitment to your own change. It has a ripple effect, as it can also train you to more effectively coach and help others develop.
A self-questioning process is best started by putting yourself into a particular state of mind. You need to allow space and time to reminisce about your past, and look for behavioural clues or patterns. It is important to keep in mind that you are, first and foremost, a person, not only a professional. Whether you are a team member, a manager or a leader, examining your personal life is an important part of becoming more self-aware.
The following might help you get started on your thinking process:
In terms of frequency, most organisations will have a well-defined performance assessment cycle that will generally consist of a mid-year review of objectives and a year-end review of performance. It can be beneficial to mirror this frequency and factor some self-awareness-building time either just before or right after your performance meetings.
SWOT analysis is a recognised strategic thinking tool that can also be useful for your personal development. ‘SWOT’ stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It is particularly effective or recommended when you take on a new role or hit a roadblock in your current organisation and are debating if you should consider a change of direction.
Specifically, SWOT will enable you to recognise and take advantage of your abilities. It provides you with a deep analysis of your strengths, uncovers the opportunities to leverage your talents, reveals your blindspots when looking at your weaknesses and helps you to see the potential threats to your own success.
Performing a comprehensive personal SWOT will take a couple of hours. Make sure you are as precise as possible in your answers to the questions about each area below, illustrating them with examples whenever possible:
What do you consider to be your leadership strengths?
How do you leverage those strengths?
What do others see as your strengths?
What technical knowledge/skills do you possess/leverage?
What functional expertise/experience do you possess/leverage?
What skills, behaviours or knowledge would you like to develop?
What would you like to stop doing?
What would you like to do better?
(Positive external conditions/factors that you do not necessarily control but can leverage.)
What opportunities do you have to elicit feedback on your leadership competences?
What opportunities do you have to leverage other people’s strengths?
What opportunities are there to create value from the ideas and opinions of others?
(Negative external conditions/factors that you do not necessarily control, but may be able to overcome.)
What obstacles or challenges could you experience when eliciting feedback?
What might prevent you from leveraging other people’s strengths?
What might prevent you from leveraging your leadership strengths?
It might be useful to share your personal SWOT with your feedback group to get an independent and unbiased opinion.
The ultimate outcome of performing a personal SWOT analysis is to craft an action plan to take advantage of your new knowledge and develop as a leader. For more on action plans and how to keep up momentum to deliver on them, see later in this chapter.
While self-awareness may be enhanced by self-questioning exercises, it can also be useful to invest time in some well-recognised tools and questionnaires. One tool particularly popular in FTSE 500 companies is the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI).
The MBTI personality assessment tool is based on Jungian psychological types. The basic premise is that an individual’s apparently random behaviour gives us insight into the way that individual prefers to apply his or her perception and judgement.
It takes into account four pairs of elements, which are four different types of preferences in certain given situations:
Completing a MBTI questionnaire may take two to four hours, depending on the version you use (there are two that can be found online at: http://myersbriggs.org).
The real value of an MBTI is in getting an expert analysis of the results and preparing a summary of key points for you to keep. You may also decide to share this with your team to give them some insight into your preferences and how they can best handle you.
Leadership is far from being a scholarly concept. The essence of leadership is rooted in delivering a product or service and having an impact on others. It is important to multiply your leadership experiences or, in the words of Alain Bloch, Affiliate Professor Director of HEC Entrepreneurs, ‘Leadership is like learning how to ride a bicycle – you do not learn by looking at the diagrams in a book. You go out there, and you try.’
Where do you find opportunities to test your skills and learn how to lead? Virtually anywhere. Leadership is absolutely not constrained to an organisational or corporate framework. Anytime, anywhere there is a problem to solve, people to influence, people to engage on an issue, work with to deliver a project or merely create, do something or find ideas and decisions to be made, there are leadership opportunities.
Proactively looking for ‘qualifying’ leadership experiences early in your career will definitely help you to build a clear competitive advantage. It is crucial, however, to take adequate time to reflect on what you have learned, and how you might shape the next leadership experience. Testing, experiencing and becoming better at it is the name of the game.
Have a think about the following questions after you feel you have closed one leadership experience but before you embark on a new one.
Also consider sharing your learning with your feedback group, so they too can help you recalibrate your behaviours.
The following list shows ways to kick-start your acquisition of leadership experience:
The question of giving feedback is addressed in full in Chapter 7, but it is useful to look here at the best ways to learn from feedback you receive.
To achieve self-awareness, you need to look at yourself as a constant work-in-progress, approaching this endeavour with humility and a proactive approach to changing your behaviours. Feedback is the best tool for helping you to become the self-aware leader of tomorrow.
Feedback should come from a variety of sources within your organisation (such as peers, bosses and team members) and outside it (friends or family) to give you the most accurate picture of who you are. Requesting feedback is not an easy task. It can feel somewhat counterintuitive when trying to establish yourself as a leader. However, having the courage and openness to ask others to help you on your journey is already a sign of leadership potential. The trick is to start thinking about feedback as being part of your learning and personal commitment to the goal of becoming the best professional you can possibly be. Any discomfort – or even shame – you might feel will not last.
There are multiple ways to gather feedback, which can be either structured or ad hoc. Both types are important: the former, giving a certain formality to the exercise, allows you appropriate time to reflect, absorb and build on it in the long term; the latter can be very effective for addressing immediate issues and behaviours that are easy to fix.
Structured feedback is usually given face to face in a formal evaluation of performance with your boss, usually twice a year. However, you may request feedback as often as you think you need it – once a quarter or once every couple of months or at different milestones, such as at the end of big projects. Structured feedback may also be obtained by using 360-degree or similar multi-rated assessment tools, with a view to helping you increase your level of self-awareness. However, generally, the feedback received from these tools addresses the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of your performance and not necessarily the ‘who you are’.
Asking the following questions during your feedback sessions can help you build a more complete picture of who you are.
Another way to use these questions is as a means of gaining feedback from your team. This will keep you honest and committed and enable you to start building trust with them.
The other type of feedback – ad hoc feedback – can be obtained via a pool of trusted people you enrol in your leadership journey. Give them the task of observing you in situ and systematically debriefing you on your behaviours, how you came across and what you did well or not. This is a very powerful technique as it allows you to focus your dos and don’ts on recent and tangible experiences.
Gathering feedback is relatively easy – once you get past any initial discomfort. What is important to your development as a leader, though, is that you also commit to proactively work on the feedback received. This will happen if you follow the thorough process described next.
Keep track of all feedback received in notes or drawings in your leadership folder, if you are keeping one. Make a point, on a monthly basis, of systematically going through these notes to identify trends and recurring points – good or bad – that you can then integrate into an action plan. This is the real value-adding part – creating a comprehensive action plan to deliver on and allow you to track the desired changes.
Your action plan should include or address the following:
Table 3.1 shows an example of a comprehensive action or improvement plan.
What really matters about the plan is that you commit to it and deliver on it.
Finding the keys to your self – and, ultimately, your leadership – is an ongoing process that requires the development of your self-questioning, experiencing what leadership entails, getting constant feedback and committing to act systematically on it.
It requires the investment of a lot of time and discipline if you are to lay solid foundations on which to build your leadership.
Undertaking a 360-degree assessment every couple of years will definitely keep you on track in your self-awareness journey and enable you to clearly identify bias and patterns and measure your progress.
It is one of the most popular tools used in organisations to elicit feedback, so most HR teams could help facilitate one for you.
This Web-based tool is designed to aggregate feedback on your leadership competences from a range of diverse populations, internally and externally.
First, you complete a questionnaire about yourself, your preferences and your behaviours.
You are then invited to select a sample of people to request feedback from.
The recommended number is 10 to 20 people, in different capacities, who interact with you on a regular basis.
The selected people then answer the same set of questions about you.
The questionnaire consists of a mix of multiple-choice closed questions and open questions, so concrete situations and examples can be mentioned. The information given is kept completely anonymous, to prevent any discomfort for both you and the other people. The output is a report.
A 360-degree assessment gives you the chance to view your assessment of yourself and compare this with the assessments given by others. It helps to quickly identify any gaps between others’ perceptions of you and your own. It also stresses what you are good at and what can be perceived as your limiting behaviours.
It is a very powerful tool to help you start your self-awareness journey. To make the most of it, consider the following before you start:
One important part of starting a leadership development programme is to have an efficient support system around you. Having a feedback group can be a huge help.
Identify a group of people – no fewer than three and no more than five – you trust, and with whom you feel you can be completely honest and open in sharing your shortcomings, doubts and fears. It is best to put together a mix of peers, direct reports and people you consider to be mentors.
When you approach them, it’s a good idea to share your development project, stressing the following:
One way to get buy in is to offer to reciprocate if you find that someone you have asked to join your group wants to start their own journey.
Are you challenging or supportive? Collaborative or autocratic? Responsible and valuing accountability? Laissez-faire? These attributes define different leadership styles. Different individuals will demonstrate different natural leadership styles. What is critical for future leaders – on top of perfectly understanding their natural leadership style – is to be fully knowledgeable about what other styles of leadership are available to them and develop the ability to flex their own style, while remaining authentic and creating the right sort of leadership in any given situation.
Leadership is often defined as the activity of providing direction, implementing plans and monitoring people. In the 1940s, psychologist Kurt Lewin defined the three main leadership styles as autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire.
This style is characterised by the leader providing clear expectations regarding:
Autocratic leaders prefer to make decisions by themselves, based on their own ideas or judgements, with little or no input from the rest of the group. One great example of an autocratic leader is Howell Raines, Executive Editor of the New York Times, 2001–3. Widely cited as a ‘hard-charging’ executive editor, Raines was known for his policy of ‘flooding the zone’ – that is, using all of the New York Times’ resources to cover what he deemed to be important stories. He was known to push people. Autocratic leadership involves having total control over the group.
The key attributes of this style of leadership are that:
Also known as participative leadership, democratic leaders prefer to offer guidance to their group. They feel that they are part of the group and look for members’ input. When it comes to decision making, democratic leaders encourage participation from the group’s members, but retain the final say and make the decisions. Usually, democratic leaders will ensure that members of the group are engaged in the process, encourage creativity and make them feel valued.
A prominent example of a democratic leader would be General Dwight Eisenhower. While it may seem counter-intuitive to cite a military leader as an example of democratic leadership, what Eisenhower achieved in the Second World War was truly exceptional. It was imperative that a common strategy be adopted if the Nazis were to be defeated. Eisenhower grasped this very early on and strived to make sure that everyone worked together, having a common understanding … and the rest is history.
The key attributes of this style of leadership are that:
Also known as delegative leadership, laissez-faire leaders offer little or no guidance and leave decision making to members of the group. Lewin’s study showed that this leadership style is generally to be avoided, unless you are leading a team of highly qualified or expert individuals who can be left to act ably of their own accord.
The key attributes of this style of leadership are that:
Having established the basics of your leadership style, it is important to assess where you naturally sit in relation to Lewin’s classification. This can be done by answering the questions in the following exercise.
(a) always ?
(b) occasionally ?
(c) never ?
(a) always ?
(b) occasionally ?
(c) never ?
(a) always ?
(b) occasionally ?
(c) never ?
(a) above average ?
(b) average ?
(c) below average ?
(Above average = you dominate most conversations. Below average = you are more often than not a quiet participant.)
(a) most of the time ?
(b) occasionally when challenged ?
(c) never ?
(a) yes ?
(b) no ?
(c) often be solely focused on yourself ?
(a) yes ?
(b) no ?
(a) yes ?
(b) no ?
(c) compare them with yourself ?
(a) being left on your own to do your own thing in your own time ?
(b) engaging in social interaction, even competition ?
(a) well ?
(b) neutrally ?
(c) rather badly ?
(a) yes ?
(b) never thought about it ?
(c) not really ?
(a) by consulting others ?
(b) by yourself ?
(c) do not generally like to be the decision maker ?
(a) it’s useful ?
(b) it’s difficult ?
(c) do not generally think in terms of hierarchy ?
Select the answers or statements that resonate most with you. To make the exercise more valuable, take time to reflect on different instances in both your personal and your professional lives.
They are both relevant to establishing your baseline leadership style.
Another very effective tactic is to have these questions in mind as you go into your next team meeting and answer them after the meeting. That way you will have tangible examples to help you with your answers.
Finally, you might decide to ask a member of your feedback group to attend one of your meetings then answer the questions. Then you could have a face-to-face debrief session to assess what is your most natural leadership style.
Check your responses for each question against the list below:
When you believe you have answered all the questions, take some time to compare and contrast your answers with the characteristics and attributes of each of the profiles of Lewin’s styles. This will help you to determine your baseline leadership style. For example, if you generally:
you are naturally an autocratic leader.
Do not be concerned if you do not seem to have a clear-cut leadership style. Simply pick the one that most resonates with you and represents you. Bear in mind that no leadership style is better or worse than any other. The point of the exercise is to be aware of your natural inclination, as an important element of your self-awareness. In times of extreme pressure or intense stress, human beings return to their comfort zone. In this case, it would be the leadership style that is most natural for you.
If you are to be an authentic leader, you will need to understand your natural leadership styles and use them to best effect.
Next, you need to build on the knowledge you acquired from completing the above exercise. That is because, while everyone has a natural leadership style, the most effective leaders are those who can switch from one style to another as required. To do this well, it is vital that leaders can read the environment and the situation and quickly assess what leadership style will result in the most favourable outcome.
Table 3.2 illustrates the pros and cons of each leadership style. It also indicates which style is best suited to a given set of circumstances.
This kind of situational leadership is also rooted in assessing everything through social, circumstantial and cultural lenses. It is important to factor other considerations into your natural leadership and decision making preferences, too.
Knowing what their skills are and where they are on their learning curves is vital. Selecting an authoritarian style for a new employee who is just learning the job may help him or her feel at ease by alleviating fear of the unknown. Equally, using a democratic style with workers who know their jobs well – especially when it is likely that you do not know all the information – will make the team feel valued. A laissez-faire approach is likely to be best when you are faced with a team member or a co-worker who knows more about the job than you.
For the best possible performance, it may be highly effective to use all three styles. For example, you might tell your employees that a procedure is not working correctly and a new one must be established (autocratic). You could then ask for their ideas and input to create a new procedure (democratic). Finally, you could delegate tasks in order to implement the new procedure (laissez-faire).
Leadership learning comes also from observing others and finding role models. Your environment shapes what it needs from you if you are to become a leader, which will mean that, at times, you will need to adjust your natural leadership style.
General Electric is known as a company with an especially effective corporate culture that fosters good leaders. Its corporate culture is geared towards excellence and execution. This can only be achieved by having flawless processes and extreme discipline.
The constant pace of change should naturally foster an autocratic leadership style, but, surprisingly, most of General Electric’s leaders appear to be democratic, as success is first and foremost a team effort. Everyone is regularly stretched and trust and delegation are critical success factors. The decision making process, however, remains an autocratic leadership act.
Culture and diversity also play an important part in deciding which leadership style to use. The power difference index (PDI)1 records the extent to which the less powerful members of a society expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. The higher the number for a country, the more autocratic and/or paternalistic is its leadership. This means that employees in countries with high scores tend to be more afraid or unwilling to disagree with their bosses than those in countries with low scores. In such countries, a more democratic style of leadership is found and there employees tend not to be as afraid of their bosses.
The last revolution in Sweden disposed of King Gustav IV, whom the Swedes considered incompetent, and, surprisingly, led to Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a French general who served under Napoleon, being invited to become the new King of Sweden. He accepted and became King Charles XIV.
Soon afterwards, the new king needed to address the Swedish Parliament. Wanting to be accepted, he tried to make the speech in Swedish. His imperfect use of the language amused the Swedes so much that they roared with laughter. The Frenchman was so upset that he never tried to speak Swedish again.
Bernadotte was a victim of culture shock — never in his French upbringing and military career had he experienced subordinates laughing at the mistakes of their superiors. That is because Sweden differs from France in the way that its society handles power inequalities. This is illustrated by Sweden having a relatively low PDI score of 31, while France has a PDI of 68.
This story has a happy ending as Bernadotte was considered a very good king and ruled the country as a highly respected constitutional monarch until 1844 and his descendants still occupy the Swedish throne.
For example, Malaysia has the highest PDI score (104), while Austria has the lowest (11). The USA’s is 40 and the UK’s is 35. Being aware of such differences will help you to choose the most appropriate leadership style.
Thus, bringing all these factors together, it can be seen that understanding your natural leadership style and being able to adjust it to circumstances and cultural differences are critical knowledge and skills to master. Only then will you be able to blossom into the inclusive and adaptable leader that the world is looking for.
Reflecting on how to adequately manage your performance is part of developing self-awareness. It is first critical to define what performance means for you and the organisation, then ensure you are always performing to the best of your ability – that is, you are delivering consistently and in a sustainable fashion. This type of self-awareness is built on understanding what external and internal conditions are required in order for you to perform. This allows you to create the most favourable environment for you and, ultimately, quickly adjust and recalibrate when you feel your performance is sliding.
Let’s use the example of a marathon runner to explore this further. A marathon runner will need enough physical strength to endure a 40-km run. He will need to be able to maintain a certain speed without too much difficulty to avoid putting pressure on his body. This should be complemented by a huge dose of mental strength to overcome pain and keep going when he hits ‘the wall’. In order to develop these three key elements of high performance, the aspiring marathon runner needs to follow some basic rules, such as never settle into a routine, constantly challenge himself and use a mix of physical and mental training techniques.
After a certain period of trial and error, all marathon runners learn what it is that they need to do to ensure they are at the peak of their ability on the day. They know with absolute precision how strict or relaxed their training programme needs to be, which sequence of cardio and strength training is best for them. They know what they need to eat, when and how often. They know what their most restful sleep patterns are and when to exercise for best results. By keeping track of all internal or external triggers, once they have defined what performance means for them, they can always assess whether or not they will be in good shape to finish their race.
Becoming a leader is a bit like marathon training that lasts a lifetime. It demands the integration and practice of four essential elements:
The best possible way to reflect on what performing well means and address the four questions above would be to set aside a couple of hours at the end of a weekend – or, preferably, a holiday, when you are relaxed and refreshed.
It is also recommended that you set aside another couple of hours to revisit your answers after two weeks to assess potential deviations. This should give you a proper baseline to start working from.
Before delving into how to create the most favourable environment for you to perform, it is important to first assess what performing well means for you and your organisation by looking at the following questions:
The critical success factors can be a mix of technical and soft skills. They represent the yardsticks by which your performance is measured. These are the attitudes or behaviours that you need to keep under control at all times and excel at. Discussions with your line manager or your most important stakeholders can be good sources of data to help you answer these questions.
Looking at these factors from the point of view of the organisation and its culture is key if you are to ensure that you are focusing on the vital sustaining behaviours and attributes for your organisation. In other words, it will help you apply your energy to the right things and assess how good a fit or match you are for the organisation. It is also a good idea to get input from your manager.
Only once you have clearly articulated what performing well means for you can you then work on assessing the conditions required for you to do so.
Some of the areas you might focus on are:
It is important to look at anything that you feel has a positive or negative impact on your being able to demonstrate your best behaviours and perform at your best. To do this, keep a diary for one to two months, jotting down instances when you performed well and others when you didn’t, articulating the outcome in each case. At the end of the two-month period, it is a good idea to summarise your findings in a list of the top five behaviours or activities you need to constantly watch to stay in your optimum performance zone. This list is what goes on your performance card.
Type or write your outcome list on a card to create your personal performance card. Refer back to it on a regular basis or when you foresee a change in pace in your working life. This will allow you to immediately spot when your discipline is starting to slide and take corrective action.
To help maintain your discipline, keep several copies of your card positioned in strategic places both at home and in the office.
At home, the most popular and useful place would be on the fridge or on the bathroom mirror, so you can see it daily or even several times a day.
In the office, again, if possible, keep it where you can see it – so, on your desk or by your computer screen would be good places. However, if this feels too public, keep it in a top drawer or in a folder by your computer.
Supplement these with an electronic version on your phone or in your diary, so you can be reminded of what it is you have to keep doing when you are travelling.
With the pressures of your daily work, it can be easy to slip off course. Integrating your performance band factors into your work environment will not only make them easier for you to implement but also encourage you to share this knowledge with your peers and your team, which can help create a mutually supportive environment.
Imagine you are the commercial director of the business unit of a Fortune 500 company, in charge of global accounts that represent about 80 per cent of the company’s turnover and about 40 per cent of its profitability. Now answer the following questions:
Your answers to the first three questions could be along the following lines:
Let us now translate these points into tangible actions that might improve how well you perform.
Leadership is a lifestyle and being able to analyse what you need to do, design an holistic strategy to achieve it – ranging from intellectual self-awareness, to an ability to understand yourself and down to creating and managing the most favourable environment to enable you to consistently perform well – and integrate it into your life is the ultimate step you can take towards self-awareness.
Here’s a reminder of some of the key points from this chapter:
1 Geert Hofstede (2003) Culture’s Consequences, Sage, and co-authored with Gert Jan Hofstede and Michael Minkov (2010) Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, McGraw-Hill.