‘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

This chapter covers:

• the importance of self-awareness when building a leadership skill set
• the three basic processes you can follow to achieve adequate levels of self-awareness – self-questioning, experiencing and proactively seeking feedback
• how to discover when you perform at your best and, subsequently, build and/or maintain an environment that is conducive to bringing this about
• the commonest leadership styles and how to identify what yours is and when and how to adjust it to circumstances.

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:

• What do I stand for as an individual?
• What are the necessary conditions for me to perform best as a person and a leader?
• What is my most natural leadership style, one that allows me to stay authentic while being able to flex when circumstances dictate?

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.

Finding the keys to your self

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.

Inquisitive self-questioning

To develop your self-awareness you must begin by looking inside yourself. The following questions are good starting points:

• Who am I?
• What are my most important beliefs and values?
• What are my strengths and weaknesses?

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.

Who am I?

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 cultural background, in terms of where you were born, your religion and so on. This might give you insights into your tolerance of difference (if, for example, you are from a minority group) or your flexibility (if your parents are from two different cultures, say). It might be indicative of how at ease you are with diversity, compromise, adaptability.
• The environment you grew up in. Your environment defines you. Early exposure to either leaders or the problems of leadership – at any level and in any field of activity – will give you a head start on the behaviours you will need to exhibit or actual role models you do or do not want to emulate. If you come from a medical or academic background, for example, you might have more empathy, an already rich frame of reference or a greater ability to think strategically.
• What is your family history and your position in the family. Are your parents divorced? Do you have siblings? Are you the eldest, youngest, the one in the middle? These things will have an influence not only on how you relate to others but also how you establish trust and what role you tend to take in groups. It will also shed some light on the origins of your drivers – a need to be noticed, successful or loved, for instance.

What are my most important beliefs and values?

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.)

What are my strengths and weaknesses?

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:

• What am I good at or not so good at and why?
• What do I enjoy and not enjoy doing and why?

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.

Practice makes perfect

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.

• What insight have I gained about myself?
• How do these influences affect my role as leader?

Also consider sharing your learning with your feedback group, so they too can help you recalibrate your behaviours.

Learning from feedback

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.

• What do you want me to continue doing?
• What do you want me to do more of?
• What do you want me to start doing?
• What do you want me to stop doing?

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:

• the top two or three recurrent patterns or the most immediate derailers – these may be a mix of soft or technical skills – that you can then address sequentially or all at the same time
• tangible actions to be taken in a determined period of time
• people who could help you to achieve your goals
• a feedback mechanism to keep the momentum going.

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.

Defining your personal leadership style

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.

Building your knowledge: the three main styles of leadership

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.

Autocratic leadership

This style is characterised by the leader providing clear expectations regarding:

• what needs to be done
• when it should be done
• how it should be done.

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:

• there is little or no input from members of the group
• the leader makes the decisions
• the group leader dictates all the work methods and processes
• the members of the group are rarely trusted with decisions or important tasks.

Democratic leadership

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:

• members of the group are encouraged to share ideas and opinions, even though the leader retains the final say
• members of the group feel engaged in the decision process
• creativity is encouraged and rewarded.

Laissez-faire leadership

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:

• there is very little guidance from the leader
• group members have complete freedom to make decisions
• the leader provides the tools and resources needed
• members of the group are expected to solve problems on their own.

Assessing your baseline leadership style

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.

Becoming an ‘authentic chameleon’

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.

Knowledge of team members

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).

Corporate culture

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.

Ability to assess the cultural environment

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.

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.

Creating your own performance card

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:

• defining what performing well means for you and for the organisation
• assessing what the necessary conditions are for you to perform well
• defining monitoring mechanisms to quickly assess when you are at risk of going off the rails – for instance, when facing an increased workload or heightened stress levels
• keeping the momentum going to minimise the risks of derailing.

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.

Defining what performing well means

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:

• What are the critical success factors in my current role?
• Why are they critical to my success?
• Why are they critical to the company’s success?
• What types of behaviours/state of mind do they require?

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.

Assessing what the necessary conditions are for you to perform well

Some of the areas you might focus on are:

• sleep patterns
• eating patterns
• social and/or cultural activities
• status of relationships with your loved ones
• exercise schedule
• status of relationship with direct reports, boss, other colleagues
• schedule of important events
• travel schedule
• overall emotional state while at your work.

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.

Defining monitoring mechanisms

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.

Keeping the momentum going

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.

Summary

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:

• self-awareness is based on inquisitive self-questioning
• create time and space for yourself to analyse who you are and make sure you investigate as many angles as possible – from your cultural background and childhood to your aspirations and adult experiences
• self-awareness also requires you to be comfortable with feedback and consider yourself as a work-in-progress. Proactively seek all types of feedback – formal, structured, ad hoc
• creating a feedback group to observe and support your leadership development can be helpful, acting as an honest yet caring mirror for your behaviours
• dedicate sufficient time to analysing feedback and crafting an improvement plan, focusing on three key behaviours or skills at a time via tangible, measurable and time-bound actions
• develop an understanding of your natural leadership style by questioning and reflecting on your behaviours in your personal and professional lives
• be aware that another type of leadership style might be more effective, depending on the situation, cultural environment or corporate culture, so adjust your style to suit the situation and increase efficiency
• think of yourself as a marathon runner and define the conditions that will result in your optimal performance, including work and lifestyle elements
• make monitoring your performance a regular activity, as by being disciplined you will minimise your chances of going off the rails
• shift your perspective on leadership from it being purely a work thing to it being part of your lifestyle – all experiences and interactions matter and can become opportunities to develop and grow as a leader.

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.