Your Leadership Best
As a senior manager you live with the responsibility of the success or failure of the organisation and each of your staff every day. Sometimes you have great moments, other times not so good ones, and a great deal of the time very ordinary moments.
How do you keep doing your leadership best especially when you are in the alligator swamp dealing with disruptions, interruptions and a thousand small emergencies every day? While books, videos and courses on leadership can help a little, there is something much more powerful and long lasting that brings you to excellence and unleashes your potential.
Reconnecting with a time when you rose to the occasion and performed at your best, when you instinctively knew what to do, and you were in the ‘zone’ unlocks your leadership best. You can revisit this fundamental state of your leadership best by following these three steps and answering four questions;
Recognise that I’ve already been there. Recall extremely challenging moments and situations where you’ve had to bring out your best to achieve what was valuable and worthwhile. Remember what qualities it brought out in you and how satisfying it was for you.
Examine how I am now. Compare your experience and performance now with what you’ve done when you were at your very best. Recapture that feeling and use it to discover what’s missing to elevate your performance and attitude to do your best.
Four questions that transform the current feeling to the state of doing your best. The four questions that can shift you from the ordinary to the extraordinary are:
What do I really care about and want to achieve?
Am I willing to commit to what I believe is right even if others don’t?
Am I willing to put aside my own and others’ self-interest for a worthwhile collective good?
What are the messages from the environment that I need to see/hear and how should I adapt and respond to them?
It is not easy to operate at your best 24/7. But when you find yourself stagnating, feeling uncertain or doubting yourself and what you are doing, or stretched to your limits, you can return to the moments when you have done your leadership best to reenergise yourself and inspire others around you to higher levels of performance.
Raising the Bar of Leadership
Remember a time when you had to get through a challenge that seemed too hard, when you had to deal with a problem that seemed insurmountable or had an extraordinary challenge that brought the best out in you. You didn’t think you’d make it at the time but you did and you learned more about yourself, the reserve and qualities you had in you than any book or leadership course could teach you. Recapturing that experience provides a great store of energy and wisdom.
Being a leader of an area requires a lot of mental and emotional effort. One day things go well, other days challenges and problems push through your office door without warning. Sometimes as a leader you can do everything right and other times you have doubts and uncertainty about decisions you’ve made or how you handled a staff member with a personal problem or reacted to an angry person.
A great deal of leadership development is based on studying successful leadership behaviours described in corporate programs and books, and encouraging people to adopt them.
Robert Quinn in his Harvard Business Review article, Moments of Greatness, describes his study which found that that leaders do their best work when they don’t copy anyone, rather when they recapture a frame of mind they had when they experienced their best as a person and a leader. Often these times occurred when leaders faced a significant life or work challenge, a crisis which had a risk of failure, a divorce, a serious illness or a loss of someone very close to them. In those moments the leaders reached deep within themselves and found important characteristics and behaviours that took them through the difficult situation to achieve worthwhile results.
A great deal of time, leaders, even prime ministers, presidents, and corporate CEOs, function in their ordinary state of mind. They follow normal managerial bounds of behaviour using rational decision making approaches and their authority to bring about change. Every day hassles and pressures of time lower the morale of the staff and weary the leader of the organisation. The leader accepts the status quo and lacks energy for creativity.
To raise the performance of the organisation, the leader must raise themselves to their own state of being their best before they can ask this of others. Getting into this state doesn’t require a crisis or a life threatening challenge, but instead a revisit to this fundamental state of being your best by following three steps and asking yourself four questions.
Re-creating the Fundamental State of Your Leadership Best
Because leaders, like many people, often do not leave their comfort zones unless there is a crisis or strong challenge that forces them out of their ordinary state, a straightforward process is helpful to recapture this fundamental state of leadership best. This process involves three steps and asking yourself four questions. Quinn’s process has been modified to be relevant to Australia and the business environment here. The terminology and steps of ‘Moments of Greatness’ have been used with Australian managers and leaders and the feedback was that they needed to be altered to be relevant to this culture. The steps are as follows:
Step 1: Recognise that I’ve already been there.
Everyone has at some time experienced this fundamental state of experiencing their best. Sometimes it has occurred as a result of a major personal challenge when we have achieved a high level of performance or other times it has occurred during times when we have been down and out and experiencing the dark night of the soul – and have come back from that.
This step can often be difficult for people because they sometimes have to revisit a time of great pain or difficulty. People often describe a time when they had a major illness such as cancer, a loss of a job or a break up of an important relationship.But if they can look past the hardship they experience they often find a deep level of commitment, ability and satisfaction. In recapturing their leadership best, leaders experience their authentic, purposeful, compassionate and powerful self.
Step 2: Examine how I am now. Comparing what we have done at our very best raises an awareness that something has slipped or has been lost in our life. Re-experiencing when we have operated at a higher level in the past instills a desire to experience this state again.
When we are in the fundamental state of our leadership best we experience positive characteristics of empowerment, creativity, clarity of mind, being fully in the present and a positive confidence that everything will turn out as it should. Most leaders would like to display these characteristics all the time, but do so only sporadically.The continual demands and responsibilities of a leadership role can cause leaders to stagnate and go through the motions. They often can put up a very professional façade of a skilled and experienced leader but behind this they have lost the zeal for leadership.Looking at the gap between when they were at their best and their current state of mind can provide a wakeup call for moments in time when the real self was present and alive.
Step 3: Four questions that transform your current feeling to the state of your leadership best. Knowing that your current state is a way off of what you experienced when you were doing your leadership best is interesting but it doesn’t get you into that state. Here is how you do:
What do I really care about and want to achieve? Clarifying what we really want to achieve and what we care about makes us reconsider what is important in our lives and what we are willing to work for. Instead of being overpowered by a problem we put power into making something happen that doesn’t yet exist but we care for it so much we will climb every mountain.
Am I willing to commit to what I believe is right even if others don’t? Often we stop short because of concern that other people or circumstances are against us. If we compromise what we believe in we feel disconnected, compliant and avoid saying what our heart really wants.
Am I willing to put aside my own and others’ self-interest for a worthwhile collective good? To focus and work for a greater good for others rather than on your own self-interest provides a deep energy and resilience. It is normal and a survival instinct to put our own self-interest ahead of the good of others. When a leader puts the good of everyone above their own personal gain, people recognise this and they give the leader trust and respect.
What are the messages from the environment that I need to see/hear and how should I adapt and respond to them? Leaders can so strongly believe in their vision and approach, they can lose contact with the cues and signals of the external world and become insular and inflexible. In order to experience your best, you need to be in touch with the external environment and respond and adapt so that you are responding to the needs of the moment.Staying in touch with the moment and responding to the environment is a key part of being your best since it means you and the world are one.
Inspiring Yourself and Others to Higher Levels of Performance
When you encounter a significant challenge, using these three steps and four questions can help guide you through the situation and revitalise your current state of mind. It can give you confidence by reconnecting with your memory, your potential and your commitment to be your best.
While remembering the fundamental state of your leadership best can be very useful during times of crisis or a major challenge, it can also help cope with everyday events and activities. Before having a difficult conversation, attend an important meeting or make a significant presentation, revisiting times when you experienced your leadership best can be very helpful.
When you shift into the fundamental state of your leadership best you can reinvigorate your staff with energy and vision. If you are in a state of clarity and focus, others around will be motivated to perform at a high level.
Using some or all of the four questions can be a useful way to unlock a team discussion in order to solve a problem or provide creative alternatives. It is also useful for leaders to ask if they are providing the conditions and challenges for their subordinates to experience their state of leadership best. Everyone wants to experience times when they are performing their best – it is a natural desire of humans to be their best.
Clarifying the results you feel are important, acting courageously based on what you believe in, putting a greater good before your own interest and being open to and responsive to signals from the environment so that you stay in touch with what is needed helps unleash the potential in yourself an others.
Reference: Moments of Greatness: Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership by Robert Quinn, Harvard Business Review, July – August, 2005, pp 1 – 11.