How To Lead Yourself Effectively
Many people understand intuitively that if you can’t lead yourself effectively, everything else in your life will be a struggle. Self-leadership comes first. It makes every other kind of leadership possible. That’s where personal credibility is established.
Some of the challenges you face may come from the way you lead yourself. You may attribute them to someone or something else, when you actually need to look at yourself as the source.
Why Does Leading Myself Seem More Difficult than Leading Others? We have blind spots preventing us from seeing where we have problems and fall short. What are blind spots? They are areas in which people continually fail to see themselves or their situation realistically.
Everybody has some; few people recognize their own. While blind spots cause all people problems, they can be especially harmful in leaders. Because leaders influence others and their actions affect a team’s, department’s, or organization’s outcomes, the problems that come from their blind spots are exaggerated. The four most common and destructive blind spots among leaders include having a singular perspective, insecurity, an out-of-control ego and weak character.
What Are the Most Important Values for a Leader? Here are the leadership values that I believe are most important:
• Servanthood: Leading well means serving others. If you are willing to embrace servanthood, not only will you become a better leader, you will help your team, help the people your team serves, and make the world a better place.
• Purpose: Let your why direct your what. Success comes from knowing your purpose in life, growing to your maximum potential, and sowing seeds to benefit others.
• Integrity: Live the life before you lead others. When you become a leader, you must focus more on your responsibilities than on your rights. You must do more than you expect of others. If you live the life first and lead well, others will respect you. And the chances are good that they will be willing to follow you.
• Relationships: Walk slowly through the crowd. Leadership impact is drawn not from position or title but from authentic relationships. How do you develop authentic relationships? You live with authenticity. You treat people with kindness and respect. And you go to where they are to connect with them.
• Renewal: Replenish yourself daily. If you don’t make an effort to replenish your energy, feed your soul, and renew your mind, you will run out of gas.
What Is the Most Effective Daily Habit for Any Leader to Develop? If you could cultivate only one habit to practice every day of your life, I believe it should be this: giving more than you receive. Giving acknowledges that others have helped us, and giving requires us to get beyond ourselves. Giving is by nature intentional. And giving changes the world — one person at a time.
How Do You Lead with Humility When in the Tough Corporate World It’s Viewed as a Weakness? I think this question reveals a misconception about the corporate world. People in business don’t automatically see humility as weakness. They see weakness as weakness —weakness in preparation, skills, work ethic, etc. People who achieve at a high level of excellence can smell weakness.
That brings up the question of what humility is. Humility doesn’t mean being weak. It just means thinking of yourself less. It means being realistic and grounded. It means valuing others and their contributions. People like working with a leader with those characteristics
