Leadership - Joyful and Universal
Everyone is a Leader. What do you think when you read that statement? Often people think they are only a leader if their job title contains words like manager or director.
Thought leaders like John Kotter and Warren Bennis describe leaders as people who think long-term, innovate, challenge the status quo, establish direction, focus on people, and inspire.
What changes for you when you consider these definitions of leadership? What is possible if you step into your leadership power in whatever role you hold?
In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck notes that effective leaders are constantly trying to improve, surround themselves with the most capable people, look at their own mistakes and deficiencies, and ask what skills they and their organization will need in the future.
Leadership requires us to innovate, change things and take risks. Therefore we have to not only overcome a fear of failure, but learn to embrace it as one of the fastest routes to learning something new. If we fear failing we play small, avoid risks, and only undertake tasks that we know we can do well.
The first step in embracing your leadership capacity is figuring out where you are now. Take a few moments and rank how you are performing on a scale of 1-10 (10 = highest) in the following areas:
Decision making _____
Risk taking _____
Team participation _____
Client service _____
Communication _____
Results _____
Managing change _____
Strategic planning _____
Considering your rankings above, what leadership skills would you like to grow? And where are you willing to risk failure?
Let's say you want to improve your communication skills and participate in more activities with your development team. Start by setting a specific goal and choosing actions.
You decide to seek feedback on your research services from the development team by the end of the next quarter. Your actions are to create and conduct a feedback survey, undertake in person feedback meetings with selective staff, summarize results, decide on changes to your services, and make a final presentation at the development team meeting.
Reflect on what achieving this goal will give you. Consider the obstacles that might stand in your way. Finally take an honest look at what you need to do to overcome these obstacles. What do you need to learn? What do you need to let go of? What support do you need?
You see this accomplishment will give you confidence, visibility and stronger relationships with all the staff. You feel the obstacles may be time, fear of getting feedback you don't want to hear, and feeling nervous about presenting this information in front of the entire team. You decide you need to be open-minded and authentic. You choose to embrace both the positive and negative feedback. You seek support from an SDO who is a strong champion of your research services and ask her to be your first interviewee so you can test the questions.
This is an example of someone stepping into their leadership power. Now the question becomes what action will you take? And when?
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Janice Cunning is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach trained by the Coaches Training Institute. She combines her coaching skills with 15 years of experience as a fundraising consultant and researcher, most recently as senior consultant at KCI. Janice presented the keynote presentation "Leadership: Joyful and Universal" at MARC 2011.