Improving your leadership
How is ‘The Great Resignation’ affecting your business? Are you having challenges attracting and/or retaining talent?
While you may not be able to change the fact that talent is in short supply, it is key for you to work on the things you can change in order to retain the right people. As the relationship with their manager is one of the most frequently cited reasons for leaving a job, one thing you can work on as a leader is yourself.
This post is not going to give you a ‘7 things great leaders do’ list. You will have your own views as to what they are. What I am going to cover in the next few paragraphs is the how to start getting better at being a leader.
The key is to have sufficient self-awareness that you know how other feel to be on the receiving end of your interactions with them.
So how do I improve my self-awareness? A good place to start is to look at your natural tendencies.
We all have them, and they are fairly hardwired. One of my tendencies is I like to think through what I say before saying it. This leads to a pattern of behaviour which is great for contributing to a meeting about a KPI, but when a more spontaneous response is required (for instance on hearing news of a personal triumph or disaster) my tendency to want to think before I speak can make me appear cold and unfeeling.
Your tendencies will, left unchecked, heavily influence your actions and as we all know actions have consequences.
A useful tool to help you think about this is Giant’s ‘Know Yourself to Lead Yourself’ methodology – see the diagram below.
The core of who you are is your skillset, your emotional intelligence and your understanding of how you are wired. All of us have tendencies that are hardwired into our personalities and we are not consciously aware of them. These lead to your default actions, and your actions have consequences which shapes yours and others reality.
The Mobius strip in the diagram can work clockwise and anti-clockwise:
Clockwise: Current reality = high staff turnover. This may be a consequence of my actions as a leader. What tendencies have formed patterns of behaviour that lead to actions my staff don’t appreciate?
Anti-clockwise: I have a tendency that leads to me taking actions my staff don’t appreciate. I need to change that action to create better consequences and improve my current reality.
The impression you create is influenced by your tendencies. The more self-aware you are, the more able you are to choose your actions rather than having them defined by your ingrained tendencies.
And if you are struggling to identify your tendencies talk to someone close to you or, reflect on the last time you had an argument with them and they said something beginning with the words ‘you always…..’.