Figuring out what it doesn’t mean is as important as figuring out what it does. Somewhere in the balance of caring and staying open and realizing that we can’t control anything but our own responses is true inner peace and happiness. When we find that, we become more creative, have more impact, and others are attracted to us. Our natural leadership impact increases.
What would change in your life if you could let go of something you’re hanging on to right now?
When we talk about leadership, the word “results” almost always enters the conversation. This is natural because we were trained to view leadership as a results-oriented set of skills. We take that view and we paste it onto teamwork and organizational development and everything else that we touch, rather like King Midas and his love of gold. We love results and we want to surround ourselves with the tools to achieve more and more results. As many results as we can gather in our arms and as high a pile as we can reach on tip-toe.
Does this sound selfish and greedy? It is. It is a selfish way to lead. When we lead from results, we force everyone, including ourselves, to become outwardly driven. We work from the end backwards, and we become controlling because we have this one goal in mind that we must achieve at all costs. We become controlling because we view ourselves, the leaders, as totally responsible for the success or failure of achieving the goal, never mind how many others may contribute.
On the other hand, when we lead from synergy – appreciating and harnessing what we each bring to the process that is uniquely ours to bring, what we contribute as a group, how what we contribute impacts the client, the world, the team, ourselves, and why we are doing it to begin with – we begin to open ourselves to trust. We trust the process and each other, our team and their innate knowledge and skills, and most importantly, ourselves.
One of the most important skills a powerful leader can develop is the ability to live in the moment of synergy while keeping a detached eye on the goal. We can engage fully in the process while checking to see that we remain on target. This is very different from driving the process from the target backward.
Here can you let go of results and trust in the process a little more with your team? How can you lead from synergy rather than control this week?
Keywords: synergy, trust, leadership, teamwork, control, process, results
In his book, Leadership from the Inside Out Kevin Cashman discusses the critical difference between persona and character and why a leader would want to minimize, but not necessarily abandon persona.
Persona is that collection of attributes we take on to cope with the outside, and sometimes the inside, world. It is what we project to the world so we appear in control, masterful, confident, capable. It is rooted in what we do, what we achieve, what we have, and what we show.
Character, on the other hand, is based on deeply centered values which are untouched by the outside world. It is who we are at our core, what we feel, what drives us from an authentic center, what is vulnerable and personal. We often keep our characters hidden out of fear that there is no place for them in the real world. We have been programmed to respond to results, not values, and results are where persona lives.
Cashman asserts that a leader cannot become truly great unless they grow their character to be so large that only a very flexible and fine layer of persona remains on the outer shell – a shell which becomes responsive and adaptable and highly aligned with the character which it contains. To nurture persona, by contrast, is to thicken our shells, to wrap our characters in ever smaller and tighter cores that may never be able to break through to the surface to have influence. We become rigid, inflexible, inadaptable.
How thick is your persona? How big is your character? From which position do you lead most often? What step can you take today to enlarge your character so your leadership takes on greater authenticity?
Keywords: authenticity, leadership, character, values, control