Previously you have been infused with the complexities of leadership in a networked world.
Also you have seen leadership is highly contextual.
A good understanding of who you are can help you to understand in what context you are
most likely to flourish.
It also helps you to live your life, rather then being lived.
Many senior leaders take the time to reflect on the complexity of the world they faced
with and also on who they are.
What their strengths are and what their weaknesses are.
What leadership means for them personally.
In this part we will try the impossible.
In a very short period of time we aspire to help you learn more about yourself and you
will do this by writing your personal charter – a self-determined reference guide that
might help you throughout your life.
Around the globe, many people including business and society
leaders go on “coaching classes” or “leadership development courses” to develop their personal
vision or spend months, sometimes years of reflection to discover
what they want in life.
Personal leadership is a 40 billion euro industry globally ranging from one-on-one personal
coaching with a professional coach to multi-day programs like “leadership trails in nature”.
While it will be very hard for us to offer you a similar experience without face-to-face
contact or a personal development coach.
We aspire to be the first online course to help you discover more about yourself and
your mission in life.
But even if we can’t offer the same as “in-person” leadership journeys we are certain that the
topics of this chapter can help you start the discovery.
We will take the time to look inwards, and to find out what kind of leader you want
to be.
What drives you?
What are you good at?
We will ask you to write down everything that you learn about yourself,
in order to develop your “personal charter”.
To help you during this journey you can download the “workbook” called “Reflections and
Personal Charter”.
After that, we will switch the focus from “understanding
yourself” to “leadership habits and rituals”.
We will apply a set of proven tools of effectiveness to further develop your leadership style,
focusing on increasing positive emotions and decreasing negative emotions.
We will look at the future.
We will explore the principles of how to create lasting change in your personal behavior.
And there will be time to revisit your Personal Charter.
Let’s get started.
In my years as a strategy management consultant I have worked with many teams from different
companies with different cultural backgrounds.
At the start of working together as a team we used to do “team learnings” – a session
where we would align our ideas on what a successful outcome of the engagement would be and also
how to approach it, but we would also take a moment to share with
the team what every individual wanted to learn.
And interestingly, whenever I asked the questions “what are
you good at and what do you want to develop”, the majority of the people had a hard time
articulating their strengths and how to apply them in their work streams clearly,
whereas almost everyone could clearly articulate the things they were less good at or wanted
to develop.
Interestingly, research shows the importance of strengths
above anything else.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Researchers looked for the strongest predictor for high performance teams.
The answer?
The number of team members that indicated they are using their strengths every day.
Another research study quotes the observation of bowling teams in 1982.
They focused on two teams.
Team 1 was shown a video highlighting only mistakes in previous games.
Team 2 was shown a video highlighting only successes.
In fact, both teams got better.
But the team that saw the video with the successes, improved twice as much as the other team!
Furthermore, this research shows that people grow the most
in areas in which people already show high performance to begin with.
When we are children, we find this very logical.
Anna is good at math, so she finds it easy to learn the new mathematics
material.
Timmy is good at English, and he also learns the new English material
more easily than new material in other courses.
But somehow we seem to forget this when we grow up.
However awareness, utilization and development of your strengths
is critical for adults too.
This is not to say that you should forget about your weaknesses,
of course not.
It is good to be aware of your own weaknesses and even try to improve them.
Especially, if they are holding you back from using your
strengths.
But it is strengths where real performance and growth comes from.
And thus, we will focus on strengths for the remainder
of this part.
We will do one exercise - an online survey, where you will explore your own strengths.