How to make yourself a great leader

Summery. Leadership is traditionally taught as a combination of major tasks, such as having difficult conversations or training someone. In fact, well-guided is an integrated activity, in which many are working together. One way to learn to do this better is to think of leadership as a series of small actions that are followed, then carefully arranged during the conversation and connected. There are. For example, instead of thinking of something as a "difficult conversation", a leader's goal may be to disarm, then praise, then appeal to values. Research identifies 25 such actions, and learning to implement them under the right circumstances can help you become a better leader.

Julie, an organic chemist, was researching drugs in a laboratory. His boss, Gordon, was a well-known scientist, but he was also very cheerful. One day she went to Gordon's office to ask for his opinion on a draft of a research paper he was co-authoring. The dissertation represents months of hard research. Gordon told him it was the "worst piece of garbage" he had ever seen.

Julie replied, "Gardener, I'm not at all surprised that you thought the paper was rubbish. Honestly, I had the same feeling when I was writing it. I felt like I was moving on. When I I am always amazed when I read your papers because they are incredibly clear and bright. This is actually one of the reasons why I wanted to work with you and when you sent me last season. Why was I so excited to be offered a position in the fall? The results of our research can be very important, and I know that if the paper is well written, it can have a tremendous effect. Maybe, but I'm wondering if you have any suggestions on how I can improve it. I want to learn from you as much as I can. "

Gordon's mood seemed to improve immediately. He looked at the paper, pointed out how to solve problems, and offered ideas. Julie published the article in a leading journal and won a major award. (This is a retelling of a true story from the writings of eminent psychologist Dr. David Burns.)

In this conversation between Julie and her boss, who was guiding and who was following?

We occasionally see significant leadership actions by people like Julie who are not formally trained in leadership. And in fact, many famous leaders seem to have received even less training: Abraham Lincoln studied only one year, Mother Teresa and Eleanor Roosevelt did not attend college, and Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi from their confessions. There were poor students. So how do ordinary people get into extraordinary leadership?

No question can be more central to organizations today. Extensive barriers that routinely hamper business make it impossible for the top few leaders to imagine the future and bear the full burden of advancing change. Gartner's survey of more than 6,500 employees and more than 100 CHROs worldwide found that "the best organizations rely on their manpower, not executives, to lead change."

Behavior and qualifications

Experts have traditionally organized leadership discipline into behaviors such as difficult communication, confidence building, feedback, coaching, inspiring, influencing, and changing the behavior of others. Aspiring leaders are invited to master each practice separately. This can be challenging, as each behavior comes with its own framework and checklist, making it difficult for learners to master and practice all the things they need to do. Have been suggested. But in the leadership workshops we have provided for clients at the Mentora Institute, there is another fundamental problem with this model of behavior.

Let's go back to the way Julie talked to Gordon. Responding to his remarks, did Julie have a difficult conversation with him? Build trust with it? Give it an opinion? His coaching? Encourage it? Is it affecting? A change in his behavior?

Wasn't she doing all of the above - and that too, in just 35 seconds?

These attitudes do not seem to be different. With that in mind, can we improve leadership architecture in a way that makes it easier to learn?

Over the past 10 years, our research team in Mentura has compiled and analyzed 1,000+ ideal leadership moments - conversations, meetings, conflicts, negotiations, and speeches that individuals have made with their peers, partners, opponents, audiences, even friends and With family , Where he achieved extraordinary effect. On the surface, we observed numerous differences in the circumstances in which these individuals were placed, and how they reacted. But as we dug deeper, we uncovered three common themes.

One, they bring the same intention in these moments: How can I bring the best in myself and the best in others to achieve my shared positive goal?

Two, to achieve this intention, they try to activate one or more of the five energies in themselves and others:

• Purpose: A commitment to pursue a noble, uplifting cause.
• Wisdom: A calm receptivity to the truth — with all its nuances — in every situation.
• Growth: A continual striving to approach one’s full potential.
• Love: A fostering of warmth, understanding and connection.
• Self-realization: A stirring of the human spirit that lies at one’s core.

Third, they use simple steps to activate these energies in themselves and in others. For example, Julie used five actions to enable wisdom, love, purpose, and progress:

Every action begins as an inner process ہدایت directing your intentions, feelings, and thoughts to the right energy within you. You can then engage in the external process of using the correct facial expressions, accents and words in your dealings with others.

If Julie had chosen to compliment Gordon's writing on the outside, feeling angry at her on the outside, Gordon would have felt that she was falsifying it - or at least, she would have felt unauthentic. The internal process must precede the external. In our experience in Mentura, leadership training that focuses entirely on training people to say or do the right thing often makes learners feel unauthorized.

Ultimately, actions are the building blocks of behavior. And countless leadership practices can be built from a small process. Nature works like this: great type on the outside, a few building blocks on the inside. Innumerable liquids, solids and gases are made up of only 118 elements. Numerous books and words have been written using only 26 letters of the English alphabet. And countless melodies are composed of only twelve notes on the scale of Western music.

This approach imposes a demand on us: the need to be humble, no matter how high you are in leadership, the next step in your development may be to do a few simple things that You are not currently using.

Three Benefits of Energy / Action Training

In our work with clients, we have moved towards using the energy / action approach as it has three benefits.

Achievable

The science of learning shows that a discipline is mastered simply by breaking it down into simple elements and then learning and practicing them, first individually and then collectively. Most tasks take five to 10 seconds to complete, so they are worth learning more than the whole process. A few weeks after undergoing energy / action training, an HR manager at Lolimon shared, "Since actions are so simple, I realized that I already have a lot of these things in my daily work and life. Has been added. "

Authentic.

In this approach, you choose the right action from one moment to the next, and you perform each action authentically by first aligning with what you are thinking and feeling. ۔ An engineering manager at SAP observed, "I don't need to go in search of different tools or frameworks from others. Instead, I need to activate the five energies at my core and express them through the right actions. I'm focusing on. "

Reckless.

Because you can choose a new action every few seconds, the course of your action changes as the situation unfolds, such as when you encounter resistance or when the other party retreats a little. "By working with energies and actions, I can adapt my behavior to the unique situation in which I am at a particular moment," noted a United Health Group executive.

The Energy / Action Approach allows you to master leadership in small steps, each step becomes a big leap in expanding our store of behavior. This "small step, big leap" approach may in fact be how Gandhi, Lincoln, Mother Teresa, Mandela and others became extraordinary leaders from the common man.