Blog Archives

A+ Lady Leader - Self-Awareness

16/8/2017

Do you ever feel like you don’t understand someone? Worse, do you ever find that you can’t fathom why on earth you did what you just did? Many of us don’t understand why we reacted the way we do, feel the bizarre emotions that we can’t seem to control and struggle to make sense of how we tick.

That my dear is why you need to increase your self-awareness!

Leadership Competencies
Over the last few weeks in the Excellence in Leadership series, we have been focusing improving yourself so that you can be an A+ Lady Leader. I’ve asked you to consider the skills you need to work on, to have the impact you desire. These skills hail from The Leadership Circle Profile. This assessment is a 360 tool I use with my Lady Leaders who join the Women with Grit Program.

The Leadership Circle measures a set of well-researched competencies that gauge how leaders achieve results, bring out the best in others, lead with vision, enhance their own development, act with integrity, and encourage and improve organizational systems.

Are they crazy or are you crazy?
We spend a lot of time trying to figure other people out, why they drive us crazy, and how to motivate them. It seems that many of us spend less time trying to grasp what is happening inside of us and how that sways our outer performance, and then how all of that circles around and influences our feelings and moods. Taking the time to do this grows your self-awareness and is a vital skill that effective leaders hone.

You're not crazy - You just need to be more self-aware
To increase your self-awareness, The Leadership Circle has identified four competencies. Developing yourself in these areas will help you to acquire high-level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Yes, this work does require a commitment to ongoing growth and development. If you are up for that, then let’s look at the four areas.

Selfless leader
Have you ever heard the term servant leadership? That is primarily what selfless leadership is. It is focusing on serving others, the clients you work with as well as your employees over and above yourself.

When you are a selfless leader, you see your relationship as a key component in helping you serve your people and the mission. You often share the role of leadership, knowing that it’s not about you receiving all the glory, but about making sure the work that needs to be done gets done. Therefore whoever is best suited, does it. Additionally, you have deep compassion as you connect strongly to the human element of the work you are doing. It’s not just about budgets and stats. It’s about making a difference.

To focus on developing yourself as a selfless leader, do more of the following:

Look for ways to collaborate both internally and within your community
Focus on the mission and vision of your team or program
Connect to your why – this is your reason that you do this work

Concentrating on the meaning behind the work requires you do the inner work of actually understanding why you do the job you do. This internal work comes back to understanding your values, vision, and purpose. Yours. Not the companies. Both are important. However, it starts with knowing yourself.

Balance
Self-aware leaders maintain a balance between both work and life, but more than that they’re able to do that along with high-performance leadership and the subsequent level of tension and pressure that comes with that.

Many of us have struggled with stress and burnout. I know that my health and my personal life both took a hit as a result of my intense focus on leadership over the years. I worked too many hours and put too much energy into solely my job. Learning to balance that is not an easy feat. It’s not simply about living a Zen life.

To truly deal with the pressures that come with leadership, while achieving the results and sustaining balance demands that you:

Find adequate time for reflection
Commit to focusing on both diet and physical health
Pay conscious attention to your well-being
Develop good time management skills and get good at prioritizing
Become very self-aware so that you can respond to your mental, physical and spiritual health to keep the balance while dealing with ongoing leadership expectations.

Composure
Leaders relentlessly get hit both from the left and right. Just when you think you have something figured out something else comes along sending you a curveball. Many of us have been hijacked in those moments. Snapping with a sarcastic comment, rolling our eyes, or losing it on someone are not things you want to do as a leader.

Being able to remain composed in the face of tension, stress, and surprises takes work. If you have ever felt yourself become hostile, sarcastic find yourself withdrawing and hiding out under pressure you need to work on your composure. Rather than regressing to less than effective ways of dealing with pressure, your role as an effective leader is to have a calming influence on those around them when chaos hits.

To be the one to settle things down, you need to increase your emotional intelligence. When you do you will be able to do with the following:

Be decisive
Stay relaxed
Keep perspective
Handle stress and pressure well

Personal learner
I believe this mindset is probably one of the key components of all of the skills and traits we’ve been talking about over the past few weeks. To be the most assessment leader, you must have an active interest in both personal and professional development. You must work at the stuff all the time!

To reach your full potential as a leader, you must seek to know your self. You have to be committed to a lifelong journey of going within, digging around a little bit, and seeing what’s there. It is necessary that you be willing to reach out and ask for feedback and help.

You must

Increase your knowledge
Grow your self-awareness
Allow this to feed your insight
Apply what you have learned to gain wisdom

When people stop growing, they tend to lose their zest for life. Being stuck or feeling stagnant or frustrated is often a sign you haven't done enough learning lately. Self-awareness is growing from the inside out. To build your self-awareness, create habits of self-reflective practice such as:

Reading
Reflection
Journaling
Meditating
And praying

When you do, you will begin to better understand what makes you tick, why your buttons get pushed and how to manage all of that, maintaining composure and balance, while serving your purpose and leading the life you want!

Want to learn more?
You can learn more about increasing your self-awarness by listening to this session.

Then, consider where you need to start by doing the mini assessment found when you download the guide here

Weekly Facebook Live Session
Join me most Thursdays at 12:15 MDT for a Facebook Live session.

Ask me questions and gain insights as you learn to lead and live with more balance and enjoyment.

If you aren't sure how Facebook Live sessions work, learn more here.

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A+ Lady Leader Series - Courageous Authenticity

9/8/2017

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Can they trust you?

The #1 thing people are looking for in their leader is authenticity and integrity. You need to be real, and you need to be honest. Your followers want to know that they can trust you.

Authentic leadership means that you are leading authentically with courage and leading with high integrity.

How do you measure up?

Authentically Leading begins with you
This week’s focus has turned to leading with authenticity and integrity. Authentic leadership is not masked by organizational politics. It is not when you are worried about looking good or focused on winning approval and being liked. Authentic leadership is the willingness to act with integrity and to courageously tell the truth, even when it is risky.

According to TLC, authentic leadership is made up of 2 core skills. The skills an authentic leader possesses are integrity and courageous authenticity. Let’s take some time to explore them in more detail.

Integrity
When you are in integrity, your inner and outer lives are congruent. It means you walk your talk. If you lead with integrity, you practice what you preach. People will describe you as sincere, trustworthy, and they will say they respect you. Leaders with high integrity are known to keep their promises and follow through on commitments.

Lacking Integrity
When you are not in integrity people, see the incongruences. The way you act, what you say and the decisions you make suddenly become situational. People will often describe you as a hypocrite because you behave one way in certain situations and another in other places. People don't know what you stand for, or where you stand. It creates environments where people tend to walk on eggshells around you.

Courageous Authenticity
Courageous authenticity is when you are open and honest about what you think and feel. It is a high level of integrity with your communication. When you are courageously authentic, you honestly express what you feel. Additionally, you are willing to admit your mistakes, and you take responsibility for your role in problems.

Lacking Courageous Authenticity
When you are not courageously authentic, you tend to avoid conflict, play the blame game, and play political games. You might tend to stay silent rather than voicing your opinion. This could lead you to be passive aggressive or simmer with resentment instead of putting yourself out there.

Make your list
When you lead authentically, you need to know your values, ethics, and principles. You need to get clear on who you are, what you stand for and what you believe in. You must know what is important to you and what hill you will die on.

Live your list
The list of values, beliefs and principles are critical, but it is only a list. Without acting on that list, you are not courageously authentic or leading with integrity. You must lead and live that list. You need to take each of those standards and follow them every single day. When you do that, it’s said that you have morals. Your list of values and ethics become living actions. They become your day-to-day behavior, your ways, and your attitudes.

How do you measure up?
Leaders who live with high authentic leadership don't gossip, don't talk behind people's backs, and act the same way in a crisis as they do any other time. Consider the following points and see how you measure up.

If you say you have an open door policy, what happens when someone comes knocking on your door?
- Do you honestly make time for them?
- Or do you let them in the door but continue to check your email out the side of your eyes as they are sharing their challenges?

Do you say it's important to be on time for meetings and with deadlines?
- Do you follow that yourself?
- How do you handle it when your favorite employee is late?

Do you have a high standard of work?
- Do you ensure that your work meets that high standard?
- Do you hold that high standard for everyone, including your boss?

Are you authentically you, at all times?
- Do you act the same way regardless of who is in the room?
- Or is it dependent on their level in the hierarchy?

Leading with courageous authenticity and integrity requires you to be yourself, at all times. That entails you removing the layers of protection you’ve built up, and uncovering who you are at your core. Then, you need to be vulnerable and be that person, regardless of what is going on and who is around.

Want to learn more?
You can learn more about leading with integrity by listening to this session.

Then, start your list to live by downloading the guide which will help to identify your

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A+ Lady Leader Series - Relating to Others

2/8/2017

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If I asked you what your #1 job as a leader is, what would you say?

I reckon there are heaps of possible answers.

Solve problems
Balance the budget
Keep everything running smoothly
Serve the mission and vision of your organization
Just survive each day

The 2 Biggies
Those are all important task of a leader. I believe though, with my whole heart, that to do more than just survive, that there 2 critical jobs or skills you must master. They are:

To grow yourself
To grow others

Leadership Competencies
Over the last few weeks in the Excellence in Leadership series, we have been focusing improving yourself so that you can be an A+ Lady Leader. I’ve asked you to consider the skills you need to work on, to have the impact you desire. These skills hail from The Leadership Circle Profile. This is a 360 tool I use with my Lady Leaders who join the Women with Grit Program.

The Leadership Circle measures a set of well-researched competencies that gauge how leaders achieve results, bring out the best in others, lead with vision, enhance their own development, act with integrity, and encourage and improve organizational systems.

Relating well to others is critical
This week we are moving on to the set of abilities around Relating to others. Being strong in relating, is all about bringing out the best in people, groups, and organizations.

A leader who is good at relating is

warm and inviting
open and respectful
empathetic and compassionate

They see others as

individuals
with something to offer
with a potential not yet reached
with some needs that they can help that individual with

Learn to put your focus on your people
When you are good at relating you intentionally focus on people. You realize that as your people develop so does your team's capacity and thus your team success. Developing your team members goes back to what I stated at the beginning; a critical skill in leadership is the ability to grow others. However, to be good at relating you must accept both yourself and others.

You can't only focus on being liked
Some leaders find they struggle with relationships for a couple of reasons. First, they may be focused more on getting along with people, but so much so that it is at the cost of achieving results. If you find yourself here, you may tend to play it safe in relationships, sugarcoat messages and fail to speak up when necessary. You struggle to build effective relationships when it’s all about complying, pleasing and fitting in.

It's not about controlling them either
Alternately you may find yourself less of a pushover, and more controlling, Here you tell others what to do and don't ask for others opinions. You are a take-charge kind of gal who speaks directly and bluntly. You see relationships as a means to an end. You're nice, just to get the job done. If you find yourself in this situation, you might also notice that when you feel challenged and threatened by others, you become defensive. You may discount or ignore negative feedback.You aren't growing your team when you never let them do anything or make any mistakes.

Finding the balance
It is a balancing act to achieve high results and relate well others. As such, it takes practice to find that point where you can hold both a commitment to achieving high results and a focus on developing your people. Take the time to learn how to focus on your team members and you'll see them grow, so you can achieve the results.

To grow yourself in the area of relating well to others, focus on the following 5 skills :

Caring connection
Form warm and caring relationships in which you connect deeply and have compassion for those on your team.

Foster team play
You are fostering a high-performance team when you create a positive climate, promote teamwork and share leadership.

Collaborator
An excellent collaborator can engage others in a manner that allows parties involved to discover common ground in conflict situations

Mentoring and developing
You are strong in mentoring and developing others when you are maintaining growth-enhancing relationships. With that solid relationship base, you create development plans, give feedback and focus on growing individual team member.

Interpersonal Intelligence
If you have high interpersonal intelligence, you effectively listen, engage in conflict and controversy deal with feelings of others as well as manage your own feelings. That means you take responsibility for your part and openly listen to feedback and criticism.

Try this language
If you are committed to growing your ability to relate well to your team so that you bring out the best in them, here are some examples of things you may say to them.

I am curious about your perspective.
Thanks for your contribution.
How can I best support you?
Tell me more...
How can we improve?
How are you really?

Do more than just survive leadership
To do more than just survive leadership, remember to focus on both growing yourself and growing others. As you focus on developing strong relationships with your team and using those relationships to bring out the best in them, you'll begin to thrive as a leader. As you blossom, so will your team members and as a result, you'll find your group achieving those high results.

Want to learn more?
You can learn more here by listening to this session on how you can increase your skills for relating to others.

Then, apply the skills with your team by downloading the guide which will help to bring out the best in your team.

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