Learn to Lead - Leading Self

As discussed, the first step in personal development process Is leading self or personal leadership.
Personal leadership precedes everything. If we do not learn to lead self, we will be finding difficult to manage others, organizational roles and responsibilities, and even family life.

What does “leading self” mean?

Leading self-means being aware of yourself, your emotions, beliefs, values and how you are effectively managing yourself. It is more of strengthening your inner world. The quality of your inner world would reflect externally as your outlook, appearance, tone, and style of carrying out your activities.

Hence, leading self-means how you are strengthening your quality of inner world.simple.

If your inner world is positive, vibrant, peaceful, then our external personality will also be more positive, energetic and pleasant to you and others.     
    
How to strengthen the inner world?

Irrespective your upbringing and environment, with little awareness and practice, you can strengthen your inner mindset, and thereby you lead yourself. It is all about keeping your mindset in a positive mode.

Given below the factors contributing to strengthening your inner world.

1. Self-image
2. Personal responsibility
3. Self-discipline
4. Being grateful
5. Faith

When we enhance our perspectives on the above factors, eventually we can strengthen the inner mindset.

Let us discuss each factors next week. 

Steps in Leadership Development Process

As discussed, leadership is all about personal development, and it is not given by others.
How to develop your leadership capabilities?

It consists of 4 steps. 

1.Personal leadership or leading yourself
2.Ensuring cordial Relationship with others or leading others
3.Performance  or delivering results
4.Developing others as a leader 

This step is applicable for everyone at ANY stages of the life cycle. 

For example, if you a "business head," you need to develop your leadership qualities by continuously working on those four steps.

If you are entering into the professional ladder as “ Trainee,” you have to develop your leadership capabilities continuously on those steps

On a personal front, if you are entering from "Bachelor to spouse role or spouse to father /mother," you have to develop your family leadership qualities based on those steps only.


It is a continuous improvement journey throughout life. There is no guarantee that as Manager you exhibited good leadership qualities would help you at General Management level. Each level or position calls for the development of different leadership capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, the leadership capabilities could be your thought process, attitude, words, actions and results and how it lifts your surroundings, your organizations, your teams and your personal and family quality of life.

Also, you observe that the development from one step to another step is sequential.but, in reality, it is parallel development only. We can not wait for PERFECT personal development to get into the next step of RELATIONSHIP building.

The point is you need to be conscious enough to develop yourself, your relationship quality, your performance and your effort in developing others on a continuous basis.

Let us discuss each step and its components in next week.

Learn to Lead (Understanding Leadership)

What is leadership?

Leadership is all about greatness in your thinking, your words, your actions and your results which leads to making a positive impact on your surroundings, organization, and family.

Leadership is a quality of the individual on character and competency which positively helps others.

Misconceptions about leadership :

1.    Leadership is given by others
2.    Leadership is related to a title like a manager or CEO
3.    Leadership is directly related to age and experience or educational qualification
4.    Leadership is for the organizational or political environment.
5.    Leadership is more about charisma

All the above are just a misunderstanding about leadership.

If you make a positive impact even a smile in others, that is leadership.

For example, we respect some people irrespective of their age, experience, position but only for the positive impact they made on us through their intention, words or actions. Whereas we may not like some people, even though they are holding reliable power. You can relate this with your network of people.


Leadership is all about what you do rather than who you are.

To illustrate this definition of leadership, some year back, Times of India had launched ad campaign " Lead India". The video link is given below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-gvE7MGIBw

Having understood the leadership definition as more about personal development, let us discuss the step by step development process next week.

Learn to Lead

If you observe any individual’s phenomenal growth or any organizational growth or any family’s upliftment, the hidden factor among all is“leadership.”

Leadership is not about the resources or positional status; it is more of personal qualities which are uplifting the individual or organization. For example, all organizations are filled with many people with various designations denoting as leaders, even then the organization struggles to make a positive impact or sustained growth. The reason is not due to resources, it is due to a lack of leadership.

As there are misconceptions on leadership and development, a holistic understanding is required on Leadership from the inside out perspective and we will discuss  the following  aspects of leadership
1. What is leadership and how it is different from a leader or manager?
2.Steps involved in developing leadership capability irrespective of your age, qualification or position
3.Insights in each of the steps in leadership development

I am firmly believing that “ Personal Leadership precedes any organizational, family leadership.” If the person is molded with the right leadership qualities, the organization he is associating with will also be flourishing. If the person is molded with right personal leadership qualities, his family upliftment also is ensured. The starting point is " personal leadership".

The fundamental is developing personal leadership capability WITHIN, and hence we will discuss more on Personal Leadership and its insights in the following weeks in detail.

Achieve small,incremental success

Everyone desires to improve the quality of life in both personal and professional life. In reality, a few are achieving more and moving on, and the rest of them are still dreaming. The key is to take action and to make small, incremental success. The small, incremental success will give momentum to higher level achievements.
    For example, you desire to master your communication skill to scale up your professional success. One of the steps you can take is to more expressive in your organizational meeting and be heard by others. That is small; incremental success takes you towards mastery of communication.   
    Similarly, you may desire to be a likable person and balance your emotions. The first thing you can do is take a conscious call and achieve the success of being cool( not getting angry unnecessarily !) for the next one week. That is a small success. That small success will reinforce your confidence, and incrementally, you can move towards your bigger goal.   
    Likewise, in your business, if you want to scale up internationally, stabilize your business first in domestic, and it is a small success. The small, incremental success will help you to move towards a bigger goal.

    To sum up, instead of only desiring or dreaming of achieving something big, take action, achieve small, incremental success.The small, incremental success will give your positive reinforcement to achieve more!

Preserving Quality of Relationship

    

Most of the time, we use to be emotionally upset or hurt by close relationships like family members, relatives, friends due to their communications, behaviors or actions. Any stranger may not have much impact on our emotions.

      When we emotionally upset, either we tend to reciprocate to them with outburst or we tend to think too much about the incidents or the person who causes the hurt. Eventually, without our consciousness, we start recalling all unfavorable moments with the person in the past and it reinforces our emotional outburst further. In this process, we spoil our health/mind and further strain the quality of the relationship.

     What is required at the moment is just awareness on our thought process. Instead of rewinding one bad moment for many times and affecting the relationship, rewind the Positive moments many times and cherish the relationship. They are dear ones and part of our lives on many occasions as wellwisher. The quality of the relationship has to be preserved without any further straining the relationship with our thought process.The point is some relationship come across your life and stays with you for a long time for a purpose and it has to be preserved even though a few emotional outbursts happen. It needs awareness, patience, and compassion!!.

Mindset & Qualities for professional growth

As discussed in previous weeks, in a professional environment, you are being measured through Result orientation and Relationship only. On recognizing this truth, growth-oriented people develop a growth mindset towards the profession, and they display in their work as given in the following ways.

Relook at your mindset and your behaviors in the workplace for accelerating your professional growth!

How to accelerate your career growth?

Generally, in our country, we are associating our identity based on our profession. You might have come across retired people also cherish and claim their status based on past professional accolades or achievements only. Even we introduce ourselves to others by quoting what we do. That is inherently we perceive job is essential for self-identity (saints or philosophers are exceptions!) 

Also, except a few who born into a wealthy family, for most of the people, survival, wealth creation, positional status, respect in the family and society comes from the profession only. The profession could be either working self (business)or working for some as an employee. In any way, we get our happiness, wealth, status, lifestyle, practical knowledge, wisdom from work only. Unlike the western style of theory, we can not separate work and life separately. Both are interrelated.

If you take the average life expectancy of a person is 68 years, then likely 50 % of the life time, we are spending our experience with a career and its related activities. When we give 50 % of our lifetime to our profession and all materialistic and personal development occured through the profession, how can we accelerate the professional growth in a right, ethical manner so that growth will help you and others?

Many types of research are going on professional or career growth. However, would like to discuss some perspectives on the science of growth in a professional environment 

Generally, the pace of professional growth differs according to one’s educational qualification, exposure to a different learning environment, industry served. However, given the potential, there are TWO FACTORS  as demonstrated by you determines your consistent growth. 

1.Focusing & Producing Results
                AND
2.Building Relationship with others  

You must notice that both factors are equally required for long-term, consistent growth. It is not either or condition but both.

You may relate to your known/senior colleagues who have grown consistently or the person who has not grown in line with their potential.
In case of a slow growth-oriented person, you may realize that either one of the factors was lacking w.r.t reference to their position. Either they might be competent in their functional domain but lacks on soft skills or they are good in dealing with others, but lack of competency or in delivering a result.
In case of consistent growth-oriented persons, you may realize that they had balanced both factors during their career path.

Balancing of what you deliver and how you deliver are equally important when others consider you for next level growth.

For example, if you are a manager, it is expected to produce results as expected at your level and also to behave in a  certain maturity at this positional level. When you lack to produce either result or lack to display some level of relationship maturity, your growth to the next level, say senior manager in a typical case, delays or stops at the manager level only.
The point is you need to balance both and demonstrate what is expected at your existing position decides your next level growth.

Now, the action is to look at your career graph, given your qualification, age, years of experience, are you growing consistently? If you answer is "yes", you are balancing both w.r.t to your position and strengthen it further. If your answer is “No,” try to understand where you need to improve either in RESULT or in RELATIONSHIP instead of pointing others.

Let us understand further on the definition of RESULT and RELATIONSHIP and their drivers.

As discussed, one of the factors for accelerating career growth is consistency in result w.r.t to the position. Let us understand the “ expectation on result and enablers of result orientation.”

    One of my known friends was exceptionally done well at a managerial position, and his boss impressed with his performance and elevated to General Manager level. The boss expectation was to develop the business to the next level using the person’s capability. Here the expectation is to deliver business results. After some time, the boss became unhappy with his performance since my friend still behaved and delivered the result as a functional manager. When I observed and interacted with him, I realized, he was not equipping himself for the new set of deliverables.

      Here the issue is conflicting between the expectation vs. reality and no development efforts to improve the performance w.r.t new role. The approach must be the friend must enhance his knowledge, skills, and attitude towards business development and deliver result than being complacent with legacy or functional delivery alone.

      The fact is the RESULT is a  function of your knowledge about your industry, business, customer,  domain expertise, skills and more importantly your attitude in line with your position. When you are growing in your career ladder, you need to equip yourself on knowledge which is required for the job and your perspective. Also, your skills like problem-solving capabilities, communication, decision making also need to be in line with the expectation of the position. To sum up, your COMPETENCY has to be enhanced to deliver RESULTS w.r.t your position. When you are not developing your competency, your growth stops.

Hence, enhance your competency to deliver the result as this is the only shortcut for accelerating growth. 

Let us discuss “ Relationship “ factor and the enablers.

As discussed, the other factor for accelerating career growth is “ Building relationship with others”.

When we say a building relationship with others in a professional environment, it is all about how you are relating with others. Equally, how others feel when they approach you,interact and work with you in a professional setup.

Enablers of building a relationship from your end :

Respect others as such and their time  &  privacy
Giving your undivided time  to others when they need (approachability)
Helping others with your presence  or with your competency

How can you develop your relationship quality with others?

1.    Knowing more about yourself

2.    Developing your emotional intelligence

3.    Improving your communication skill as a lifelong exercise

Building a relationship is not a one-time effort. This calls for consistency.

When you are growing in your career ladder, your soft skill in handling people matters a lot along with Performance.

The action is to identify your weak spot in developing a relationship and work on that to accelerate our career growth!  

Accelerate your career by balancing result and relationship!  
 

How to quickly overcome when you feel low?

The difference between a person, who is happy and someone is unhappy, is not about how often they feel low or depressed. It is how they deal with “low mood” situation.

For example, most of us, when we feel bored, sad or feeling low, what we use to do? Immediately we switch over to browse WhatsApp, Facebook or changing the channels on TV. The strange thing is even after completing all the outlets; again we feel sad or depressed. The reason is that we are not accepting the reality of the state and allow our mind to undergo the feeling of low .Instead we switch to others.

Just experiment this when you feel low. Be open and accept that you are feeling sad, and go through the moment of sadness for a few minutes. You will surprise that you come up with the positive mood in a moment. Instead, if you look for some outlet, you are suppressing the reality, and again you start feeling low.

As I observed a few highly effective people when they feel low or hear bad news, they accept that moment and use to be calm for a few moments. Then they recover back quickly to their routine.

Hence accept – undergo – get back. This requires your awareness of your intention when you feel bad and overcome it positively!

How environment triggers your behavior and action?

when I asked the following question  in my management seminar, the response would be as follows"Imagine you are in an airport. You eat the chocolate and search a dustbin to put the wrapper. However, you do not find a dustbin in a nearby area and also you hear the announcement for boarding into flight. What will you do with the chocolate wrapper when you are in airport 1 & 2 ?"

In almost the session, to my surprise, people responded  instantly as follows

In case of  AIRPORT1, I will through  the wrapper in the corner and move on, even though it is embarrassed me,

Whereas in case of AIRPORT 2, I will keep the wrapper in my pant pocket to find a dustbin later and dispose of it.What does this behavior or response indicate? 

As a human being, we create a perception about the place based on its environment ( how it is organized & cleaned, lighting, visuals, and visibility). When the environment is more appealing, it triggers positive behavior on the people and action also positive.

Alternatively, when the environment is not conducive, it triggers negative behavior and action.

It holds good for the home & organizational environment as well. When the internal organization is organized neatly, it triggers positive behavior in the people, and it would get demonstrated with timely communication, care for the people, product, and equipment,. When the workplace is not organized correctly, people working in that environment also behave negatively as not caring anything and adding further chaos in the system.

As you are the leader of your system, create a positive environment as much as possible for conducive communication, relationship, and growth. That is a responsibility of everyone who leads.

Change Environment ----Change perception ----Trigger Positive behavior