What is Self Leadership?Posted by Andrew Bryant, CSP, PCC

Self leadership is the modern version of Socrates command to “Know thyself”.  Self leadership is Neo taking the red pill and exercising choice rather than being controlled by the matrix.

I have defined Self leadership as having a developed sense of who you are, what you can do, where you are going coupled with the ability to manage your communication,  emotions and behaviour on the way to getting there. Another definitions is, “the process by which you influence yourself to achieve your objectives.”

Self leadership equates to the leadership competencies of Self   Observation and Self Management but most importantly Self-leadership impacts all aspect of  your life, your health, your career and your relationships.

Listen to Self leadership podcastFor Self leadership to occur we have met our survival needs of food and shelter and begin to look for meaning in our lives. The first skill of self leadership is to STOP and STEP BACK from the things that trigger us to react; because when we react we are being controlled by the trigger. The second skill is to consider our INTENTION. Intention is what is important to us, our values and what we are trying to achieve. By being intentional we can start to live a life of choice.

The above diagram can serve as simple illustration of the points of leverage for developing our self leadership. Intention precedes any behaviour (action). Actions have effects which we evaluate via feedback. A difference between the expected outcome (intention) and the feedback causes us to feel emotions. The meanings we make of these emotions can reinforce, reduce or distort our intentions.

To make sense of this in your own life, consider something you are trying to achieve right now such as getting healthy, increasing your wealth or developing a relationship.

Start with translating your intentions into appropriate actions.

What is it you want to achieve? What actions do you need to take to achieve this?

Once action has been taken it is necessary to be receptive to the feedback that the world will give in response to your action/s. The quality of the feedback is essential – the sooner you receive it, the sooner you can make adjustments. Beware your conditioned filters that might cause you to interpret feedback as criticism or to be selective about what you take notice of.

What are the results of your actions? Is this feedback accurate? Am I filtering the feedback?

The feedback we receive causes us sensations/emotions from which we make meaning.

What am I feeling? What does this mean? What else could this mean?

By asking these self coaching questions you pave the way for a rapid feedback loop that will enable you to make the adjustments required in your communication/behaviour to achieve your outcome. If problems arise start first by checking your intention, then your behaviour, then the feedback and finally your emotions.

(This blog is copyright Andrew Bryant. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

12 Rules for Self-Leadership:

1. Set goals for your life; not just for your job. What we think of as “meaning of life” goals affect your lifestyle outside of work too, and you get whole-life context, not just work-life, each feeding off the other.2. Practice discretion constantly, and lead with the example of how your own good behavior does get great results. Otherwise, why should anyone follow you when you lead?3. Take initiative. Volunteer to be first. Be daring, bold, brave and fearless, willing to fall down, fail, and get up again for another round. Starting with vulnerability has this amazing way of making us stronger when all is done.4. Be humble and give away the credit. Going before others is only part of leading; you have to go with them too. Therefore, they’ve got to want you around!5. Learn to love ideas and experiments. Turn them into pilot programs that preface impulsive decisions. Everything was impossible until the first person did it.6. Live in wonder. Wonder why, and prize “Why not?” as your favorite question. Be insatiably curious, and question everything.7. There are some things you don’t take liberty with no matter how innovative you are when you lead. For instance, to have integrity means to tell the truth. To be ethical is to do the right thing. These are not fuzzy concepts.8. Believe that beauty exists in everything and in everyone, and then go about finding it. You’ll be amazed how little you have to invent and much is waiting to be displayed.

9. Actively reject pessimism and be an optimist. Say you have zero tolerance for negativity and self-fulfilling prophecies of doubt, and mean it.10. Champion change. As the saying goes, those who do what they’ve always done, will get what they’ve always gotten. The only things they do get more of are apathy, complacency, and boredom.11. Be a lifelong learner, and be a fanatic about it. Surround yourself with mentors and people smarter than you. Seek to be continually inspired by something, learning what your triggers are.12. Care for and about people. Compassion and empathy become you, and keep you ever-connected to your humanity. People will choose you to lead them.

Manz and Sims divide the current leadership environment into four types: the strongman, the transactor, the visionary, and the super leader. The strongman relies on the issuance of commands and intimidation as the basis of his authority. The transactor, on the other hand, motivates through the use of incentives. The visionary, which is the closest of the four to the Chief Innovations Officer, relies on the workforce to adopt his vision for the future and to be inspired and motivated by it. Finally, the super leader understands the psychology of exceptional performance and trains his organization to adopt that psychology.

 

My purpose in describing this is not to urge the adoption of super leadership; although, I do believe the approach constitutes a superior model for improving organizational effectiveness and, from your standpoint as a consultant, a superior product offering for marketplace deployment. Instead, the purpose of this response is to consider the utility of creating a Chief Innovations Officer position. The problem with the visionary approach to leadership is, of course, that it requires front-line staff to buy into the leader’s vision with a level of personal commitment that may be beyond the average employee – whether the worker is tenured from before the transition or hired subsequently.

 

Under this model, the visionary would typically be the chief executive officer of the organization. As Manz and Sims note, it would be necessary to focus greater emphasis on selective, future hiring for external candidates and targeted promotions for internal candidates. This would move human resources into a greater position of power than is common in most organizations, making the Assistant Chief Innovations Officer the Director of Human Resources. This, in itself, would represent a significant cultural change, and, as we know, organizational change is one of the most difficult aspects of any firm to alter. Warren Buffett has famously noted that, “When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.“

 

Drawing on the work of Gallup’s Marcus Buckingham and his “Strength Finder” system, we know that we can identify and hire/promote for specific superstar capabilities, depending on the position and those skills that most reliably predict success within it. This would seem to support either of the two likely models for creating a Chief Innovations Officer position. On the one hand, we may seek to instill an innovations mentality throughout the organization, with every employee innovating. On the other hand, you may seek to extend the visionary model, where a single repository or small group are tasked with innovating for the larger organization. There are risks with both.

 

Under the first model, where every worker is an innovator, it seems likely that the firm will degrade into a state of chaos. Under this scenario innovation is abundant, every employee as an advocate for his or her innovation, and the firm degrades into a hydra-headed PushMePullYou of Dr. Doolittle fame – where innovative ideas arrive by the second but no advance follows in the absence of a targeted deployment of talent and resources toward the realization of the most meritorious proposals. The second model of a single repository of innovation suffers all the flaws identified by Manz and Sims, described above.

 

These two models, however, represent two extremes, failing to recognize the hybrids that exist in the expanse between them. But it does note the difficulty associated with adopting Buckingham’s model with hiring and promotion. Under the first scenario, it must be understood that innovative minds are not so readily found in the marketplace as to allow population of an entire organization with them. Additionally, innovation is not a readily teachable set of traits and capabilities; although, there are a number of advocated products and approaches in the marketplace (such as Edward DeBono’s “Lateral Thinking,” and text by the same name). Under the second scenario, it would be necessary to hire an abundance of stellar-performing non-innovating workers to carry out the innovator’s vision. The problem with this approach is that it places too much work on the innovator, just as the non-delegating Type-A manager will typically rise to one level beyond his competence (unless learning to delegate effectively). This, of course, is the definition of the “Peter Principle.”

 

A hybrid model between these two extremes would have the Director of Human Resources hiring creative minds for a skunk works of innovation, on the one hand, and hiring a production workforce of exceptional executors, on the other hand. This was a model used most effectively by Thomas Edison, and, more recently, by Dean Kamens‘ DEKA Corporation. Both represent historical superlatives – i.e., that which has been rarely achieved. For every Bell Labs, Xerox R&D, IBM, and 3M of yesteryear, there are an abundance of the opposite examples. With each of these superlative examples (i.e., Bell Labs, etc.), they were particularly adept at innovating new products and deploying the necessary capital and resources to bring them to market. Their rarity, however, indicates the difficulty of bringing this to fruition, and the realization that none

are currently considered among the most innovative organizations today indicates the difficulty in sustaining a culture of innovation and practical creativity over the long-term.

 

The reason for this is largely explained in Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.” As Christensen recounts with example after example drawn from various industries (but focusing on the disk drive industry), it is not the organization that innovates and employs capital and resources toward the realization of those innovations, it is the customer that drives the organization’s focus. This may seem contrary to intuition, but the reality is that organizations tend to focus on the demands of their existent customers – doing that which is most likely to satisfy the present source of their revenue streams. They are, on the other hand, unlikely to deploy significant resources servicing the creation and cultivation of new, innovative products for which an established market demand is not evidently available.

 

This, of course, does not mean that an organization cannot attempt to break this mold. When making the attempt, however, the immediate crisis of the moment tends to urge pulling away those working on the new, innovative project and deploying them toward resolution of the existing customer’s crisis. According to Christensen, the only model that works in the creation of novel innovations by established firms is for the existing corporation to create a standalone operation designed to bring a given innovation to completion. This would include separate staff, separate facilities, separate resources, and separate capital. None of these can be co-located or within the purview of the existing organization; otherwise, any of these may be redeployed when the need arises – and it predictably will.

 

It must, as well, be recognized that disruptive technologies and innovations tend to target a separate and greatly different customer base than the firm’s traditional clients, and that the newly- targeted market is likely to be smaller and less lucrative during the early stages of the new market’s lifecycle. Therefore, management is on less than solid ground when justifying deployment of the capital and resources toward such a new innovation. If the firm is public, with stock traded on an exchange, shareholders are likely to question the wisdom of investing significant capital toward a smaller market and an unproven product. Moreover, the net effect may promote what Peter Lynch describes in “One Up on Wallstreet” as “DeWorsification” – product diversification that extends beyond the firm’s established core competencies.

 

None of this undermines the utility of an organization encouraging innovation toward the improvement of an existing product and, thereby, satisfying existing customers or markets. Senior management can readily justify deployment of seed capital and resources toward the next advance. In this case, however, we have all the negatives associated with seeking a quantum leap

improvement, identified by Edwards Deming and the other supporters of Total Quality Management. Specifically, quantum leap advances tend to promote increased variation in product reliability. While customers are typically willing to accommodate a certain level of frustration related to new product reliability, they are rarely willing to do so with established products. In the early days of personal computers, system crashes were common, but buyers accepted it because no suitable alternative existed and there was tacit recognition that computers were on the leading edge of technology. Today, however, the customer is unlikely to accommodate an increase in computer instability, even if the new computer is faster or unreliably does everything but birth babies, wash windows, and shear sheep.

 

Fortunately, we have the arrival of Six Sigma and LEAN Systems (courtesy of Genechi Taguchi and Toyota) as a model for installing incremental advances representing new innovation for existing products. This approach, however, requires enormous focus and tremendous engineering precision at the initial design stage – deploying the quantitative tools described at the National Institutes of Science and Technology (NIST) website. This level of precision focus, however, is largely an anathema for creative minds. This is why Apple and Google are so rare in the marketplace. Today, they are uniquely able to combine the creativity of innovation with the technological rigor of a quant geek. To a more limited extent, we see this uncommon combination in the gaming industry, but writing software code in the creation of the next videogame is a significantly less complex proposition than moving from Walkman to iPod, room-sized computer systems to Macintosh, creating an entire desktop environment of web-based tools, or Detroit’s efforts at inventing a moderately-priced hydrogen-powered car. [This is because software resides in the bits and bytes of programming code and requires no translation/transition to a factory and production operations to create the end product – it only requires transferring the code to a CD.] In each of the just-described advances, we have the example of quantum-leap innovation deployed toward the improvement of existing products – rather than invention of novel, never-seen-before products.

 

Ultimately, management consulting has cultivated a less than stellar reputation for itself. It is accused of installing solutions that are unsustainable after the consultant’s departure, shilling flavor-of-the-month management theories that will not withstand the test of time, and charging too much for too little improvement. In my view, establishing the position of Chief Innovations Officer threatens to sustain that reputation for all the reasons described above.

Organizations led by the plural rather than single leaders. Usually, there will be a group of people rather than one person on the position as leaders. Depending on the capability of the leaders, they could be categorized into six groups.

1. Super leadersSuper leaders are quite capable of casting great influence on their team members. Even after they leaving the team or dead, their ideas will continue to guide the working progress in the team.

2. First-class leadersThis type of leaders exist mainly for the purpose to provide mental support to their team workers. They won’t do any things in specific.

3. Second-class leadersThis kind of leaders don’t need to actually get involved in the work as their team members are managed well and will be working quite hard to achieve their target.

4. Third-class leadersThey will get involved in the real work and try to motivate the other team workers to join the work via doing so.

5. Fourth-class leadersSuch kind of leaders won’t try to handle any work by themselves, and team members are forced to do their job pessively. Within the organization, there is too much preaching and little motivation.

6. Fifth-class leadersFifth-class leaders will be working hard while their team members have nothing to do at all.

7. Bad leadersSuch kind of leaders are ineffective and inefficient. They have got no idea what they are working for, and sure they’ve got no idea how to do their work in the right way

Emerging Approaches to Leadership April 13, 2011 in Education, Leadership with 8 Comments

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After beginning a two year research to propose some leadership theories which focus on a particular characteristic of a leader, leaving out the followers and situations from the equation, I’ve been able to break down leadership into the following four categories: Charismatic Leadership, Attribution Leadership, Transactional Leadership, and Transformational Leadership.

Charismatic Leadership

The theory behind Charismatic Leadership emphasizes the ability of a leader to communicate new visions of an organization to its followers and to raise follower awareness of the importance and core value of goals, often getting people to exceed their own interests.

Charismatic Leaders are dominant, able to express their vision, are exceptionally self-confident, have a high need for power, and have a strong conviction in the moral “righteousness” of their beliefs. They strive to project a magnetic personality which emanates success and competence, and they convey high expectation for and confidence in followers. Leader who possess and exhibit these characteristics inspire trust, confidence, affection, admiration, emotional

involvement, obedience, and high performance in their followers. The Charismatic Leader often appears under conditions of uncertainty or in times of crisis which are stressful and make more cognitively and emotionally receptive to the ideas and actions of someone perceived as a so-called savior.

Attribution Theory

Attribution Theory deals with trying to make sense out of Cause and Effect Relationships. When an event takes place, people want to attribute it with a specific cause. This theory states that leadership is simply an attribution that people make about other individuals. The fundamental flaw is a bias in the perception process because people tend to attribute the behavior of other people to their own motivation and ability rather that the situation. Research has found that people tend to characterize leaders as having traits such as personality, understanding, intelligence, strong verbal skills, aggressiveness, and often at time display industriousness.

At the organizational level, attribution theory explains why people are prone to attribute either the extremely negative or the extremely positive performance of an organization to its leadership. This theory fails to take in consideration influences or forces from the external environment. Therefore, people have a “built-in” tendency to give too much credit to other people or to place too much blame on them.

Transactional Leadership

Transactional Leadership takes place when leaders and their followers are in some type of exchange relationship which satisfies needs for one or both parties. The exchange can be economic, psychological, or political in nature; and examples might include exchanging money for work, loyalty for consideration, and political favors. Transactional Leaders help organizations reach their current goals and objectives more efficiently by connecting job performance to valued rewards or by ensuring that employees have the needed resources to get the job done. Transactional Leadership is very common but tends to be transitory, in that there may be no lasting purpose to hold parties together once a transaction takes place.

James MacGregor Burns noted that while this type of leadership could be quite effective, it did not result in organizational or even societal change and, instead tended to perpetuate and legitimize the status quo. In conclusion, Transactional Leaders view management as a series of transactions in which they use their legitimate, reward, and coercive powers to give commands and exchange rewards for services rendered.

Transformational Leadership

The Transformational Leadership process is currently the most popular leadership perspective, and it moves way beyond the more “traditional” transactional approach to leadership. Transformational Leadership is related to charisma in that these leaders motivate people to exceed their personal interests for the sake of the larger community. It also produces levels of dependent efforts and performance that go beyond what would occur with a Transactional Leadership approach alone. In addition, Transformational Leadership is much more than just

charisma. While the purely charismatic leader may want followers to adopt his or her “world view” and go no further, the Transactional Leader will attempt to instill in followers the ability to question not only the established views but eventually those established by the leader.

Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus have defined four skills of leaders hip , which are required for the Transformational Leader to be successful: First, is a strategic vision or goal that evokes people’s attention. Second, is the ability to successfully communicate that vision through words, manners, or symbolism. The third skill set is to have the capacity to build trust by being consistent, dependable, and persistent. And lastly, the fourth skill required for a Transformational Leader to be successful is the capability of positive self-regard–by striving for success. The use of these four skills builds follower commitment and pumps them up to adopt the leader’s vision as their own. They also perform their jobs better, engage in more organizational citizenship behaviors, and make better or more creative decisions.

To close, Transformational Leadership is closer to the prototype of leadership that people have in mind when the describe their ideal leader and is more likely to provide a role model in which dependents want to identify.

This wraps up an 24 month long journey down the leadership road. One in which I’m very grateful to have traveled and will continue to do so. Thank you to everybody who supported me along the way. If you have any insight or wish to share your experiences – please consider leaving a comment to my closing questions.

Of the four categories of leadership I described above, which one do you feel fits best into your daily life? Is there anything that you disagree with? If so, what is it and why do you?

What Are Leadership Enhancers?By Virginia Cowart, eHow Contributor

Hours of practice enhance performance.

Both individual and institutional leaders need enhancers to be effective in accomplishing their goals, objectives, visions or mission. Enhancers may be internal or external, but they help transform vision into action. It is virtually impossible for a top bicyclist to win the Tour de France without the enhancing effect of a team to support his quest, but he will also have added internal enhancement through rigorous training and the study of race strategy.

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Why Are Leadership Programs Effective?

What Jobs Can You Get with an Organizational Leadership Degree?

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1. External Enhancemento Sam Walton made sales history with Walmart. But his retail merchandising career

began in 1940 when he worked for $75 a month in a J.C. Penny store in Des Moines, Iowa. When he opened the first store under his name in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1950, Walton already had a vision of a new kind of discount merchandising. He enhanced his dream by offering a top store manager a share of the profits to join his team. As his business grew, he added other leadership enhancers in the form of individuals with expertise in retail purchasing, distribution, inventory systems, marketing, store location, finance, human and public relations and philanthropy. This approach led Walton and his leadership enhancement team to develop the world's largest retail system, with over $400 billion annual revenue (Reference 1).

Internal Leadership Enhancerso The Army has studied leadership enhancement extensively and concluded too

many variables exist to attempt to prepare its leadership for all uncertainty and ambiguity through external enhancers. The principles of leadership enhancement gained from these studies stress internal enhancement, such as development of self-awareness of strengths and limitations in any given situation, being able to adapt to different situations and having a philosophy of life-long learning, especially about changes in military mission, vision and technologies (Reference 2).

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Shared Vision as Enhancer

o

Leadership on professional basketball teams is enhanced by adding players with skill sets that support those of the acknowledged team leader. Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics was successful as the lead in the Celtics' 11 National Basketball Association (NBA) championships because he was able to convince other players to share a common goal and understand their roles in enhancing the team culture. Michael Jordon enhanced the skills of the entire NBA by his example. On the Chicago Bulls basketball team, he enhanced the play of teammates through his will for team excellence over individual skills and led them to six NBA championships.

Rewards as Enhancerso Effective leaders use such tools as establishing a unified vision among all

participants, matching the achievement of personal and organizational goals, creating a reward structure that includes high public esteem for individuals and rewards them with opportunities to contribute beyond expectations (Reference 3).

Enhancement Substitutes

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Many successful organizations use substitutes for leadership enhancers, the most common being the breakdown of the total job into component tasks that can be repeated with high adherence to standards. The assembly line organization of making hamburgers in a fast food restaurant assures a standard quality with infrequent deviations. Manufacturing plants have robotic operations that substitute for leadership enhancers at the operational level.

Read more: What Are Leadership Enhancers? | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/list_6755055_leadership-enhancers_.html#ixzz1pGASVmQS

Substitutes for Leadership Theory

Substitutes for leadership theory states that different situational factors can enhance, neutralize, or substitute for leader behaviors (Avolio et al., 2009; Den Hartog & Koopman, 2001).

[edit] Substitutes

Substitutes are variables that make leadership unnecessary for subordinates (Schriesheim, 1997) and reduce the extent to which subordinates rely on their leader (Kerr et al.,1974)

[edit] Examples of Substitutes

Characteristics of the subordinate o Subordinate ability (Kerr & Jermier, 1978)o Subordinate’s professional orientation (Kerr & Jermier, 1978)

Characteristics of the task o Unambiguous and routine task (when all subordinates are performing menial labor,

there is little role leadership can play; Den Hartog & Koopman, 2001)o Task that provides its own feedback as to how well the task is being done (Kerr &

Jermier, 1978)o Task that is intrinsically satisfying (Kerr & Jermier, 1978)

Characteristics of the organization o Cohesive work groups (a tight-knit group of employees have less need for a leader; Den

Hartog & Koopman, 2001)o Organizational formulation (clear job goals that are written down, performance

appraisals that are written down; Howell & Dorfman, 1981; Kerr and Jermier, 1987)o Self-managed work teams (employees rely on each other, not their leader; Villa, Howell,

Dorfman, & Daniel, 2003)

[edit] Enhancers

Enhancers are variables that serve to strengthen leader influence on subordinate outcomes (Den Hartog & Koopman, 2001; Howell et al., 1986; Schriesheim, 1997).

[edit] Examples of Enhancers

Characteristics of the subordinate o Subordinates having experience (those more experienced will be able to translate even

the most ambiguous instructions into results; Howell et al., 1986) Characteristics of the task

o Task is non-routine (Kerr & Jermier, 1978) Characteristics of the organization

o Having group norms that encourage cooperation with leaders (Den Hartog & Koopman, 2001)

o Leader having the ability to reward subordinates (Howell et al., 1986)

[edit] Neutralizers

Neutralizers are variables which serve to weaken, or block leader influence on subordinate outcomes (Den Hartog & Koopman, 2001; Schriesheim, 1997).

[edit] Examples of Neutralizers

Characteristics of the subordinate o Subordinates are indifferent when it comes to rewards (Kerr & Jermier, 1978)

Characteristics of the organization o Whether or not subordinates are rewarded is not the leader’s decision (Kerr & Jermier,

1978) Kerr & Jermier (1978) never specified an example of a task characteristic that acts as a

neutralizer.