THE LEADERSHIP JOURNEY
Part I
Leadership development is a lifetime journey, not a quick trip.
- John Maxwell
As a leader, you have reached a level of success. What's next? In the next issues of our newsletter, we will walk with you as you continue your leadership journey and suggest a few stops. Enjoy the ride! Stop One: Brutal Assessment
It is time in your leadership journey to make an intentional and focused investment. An investment that will take you out of your comfort zone, and will require a focus on improving yourself. Your starting point should be a brutal assessment of your own strengths and limitations. This level of exploration requires intrapersonal candor that leads to awareness of life long patterns and risk factors that can derail your career and limit your organizational success. Effective leaders recognize that to change core sabotage behaviors, it requires more than just an intellectual understanding or skill-based training. It requires an exploration into the emotional drivers that trigger the ineffective behaviors. Change demands conscious and intentional efforts to overcome those emotional patterns, which escalate under stress. Through awareness of these tendencies, you will increase your ability to choose different behaviors that lead to more effective results. In this stop in your leadership journey, take the time to focus on what truly makes a difference in your leadership effectiveness, and identify your strengths and understand your weaknesses. We encourage you to ask yourself the tough questions. What is it that differentiates you from other leaders? What patterns do you exhibit which trigger others? Once you identify what you need to address, move outside of your comfort zone to address these weaknesses. Take Action! Where to Start? Leadership Assessments - One great leadership assessment to help you initiate your brutal assessment is the HOGAN Challenge. This diagnostic identifies how you respond in various situations. Another great tool is the Business Genogram. The Business Genogram is a unique and powerful tool to help with greater understanding of your leadership behaviors and their potential impact on others. This tool can be a powerful guide to understanding your family and how it shaped the patterns of your behavior. A genogram is a diagram used for interpreting behavioral dynamics and relationships. By working through this process, you gain awareness of your day-to-day behavior in business relationships with your peers, executives, and, especially, your team! It will also give you insights on how you continue to interact with others. This tool is used to identify repetitive patterns of behavior and predict potential areas of challenge. Other behavioral assessments to help you better understand your preferences, social interaction tendencies, leadership, and communication styles are: - MBTI® (The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®)
- The DISC Behavioral Assessment®
- FIRO-B® (The Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior®)
Be Honest- You may be tempted to gloss over or minimize your weaknesses by focusing on how best to leverage your strengths. Conversely, you may give in to the urge to overanalyze your liabilities because you feel inferior. In either case, you are not being honest with yourself. These tools support your ability to face yourself in the mirror and assess yourself in terms of what is working and what is not working. Solicit Feedback - Consider conducting a 360° assessment. A data-gathering process engaging your key stakeholders, colleagues, cross-functional peers, and direct reports, soliciting feedback on their perceptions of your strengths and weaknesses, identifying specific behaviors and their impact to others. This process will serve as valuable framework for achieving higher levels of personal and professional development. Seek out a trusted advisor, mentor, or an executive coach - In your leadership journey, it will be critical to your success to have someone you trust, someone who has your best interest in mind, and someone who can provide objective advise. Find someone you can talk to comfortably, and explain your concerns about risk factors and ask for help in validating your assumptions and/or the root cause of issues.
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