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As a leader, if you want to be effective at managing your team and managing your company, actually it starts with you. Leading yourself is the hardest part. And yet, the first person you lead every day is yourself. The one who wakes up in your pajamas.
Radical Self-Examination
What does it even mean to lead yourself? The first is to increase your self-awareness, to really understand where you’re coming from. What that requires is a radical self-examination. And I use that word radical kind of on purpose because it really requires you to be brave at looking at your foibles. To be courageous at looking at your insecurities and your doubts and also your weaknesses and blind spots and obstacles, the things that get in your way. And so when I say radical, what I mean is really looking at both the bright side, the amazing things, and kind of that difficult, uncomfortable stuff inside of you that is getting in your way unless you’re on top of it.
The good news on that is once you engage in that radical self-examination, you’re going to have a much better picture of yourself. You’re going to be able to really have a better relationship with yourself, and you’re going to use all of those tools, all of that inside stuff that you’ve kind of figured out, that you’ve mined about yourself, as tools, as fuel to manage other people around you and ultimately lead you to successfully managing your business.
Six Questions for Assessing Your Leadership Style
There are six things you need to think about on kind of how you show up as a leader. The first is, how do you express yourself? Are you the kind of person who asks a lot of questions and you engage people by questioning them? Or are you the kind of person who delivers really directives, makes declarative statements?
By the way, both of those styles can be good used in the right time. But as a leader, you probably naturally swing towards one or the other. The way to figure this out is to notice how often you’re engaging in dialogue back and forth with people where you’re sort of engaging in questions and answers. Or how often you’re kind of issuing orders and then just asking people to move forward with those things. But it’s very helpful for you to figure out what your natural swing is.
The second is conflict. Are you the kind of person who shies away from conflict, or do you kind of lean into conflict? Sometimes people who lean into conflict are comfortable with conflict, but they even create conflict where there isn’t any.
The third element is how you relate to feedback. Are you the kind of person that weighs in quickly to give feedback, or do you kind of wait and wait and wait and wait to give feedback?
Number four is a big one for leaders: How much do you want to control the process? There are a lot of leaders who are control freaks and don’t want to give anything away. Other leaders are happy to give everything away, sometimes to a fault. So realizing where you fall on that spectrum is an important part of distinguishing your leadership style.
The fifth one is how do you respond to stress? We all have stress. And when you’re a leader, you have a lot of high-stakes things going on. So you have a lot of stress. So what do you do? Do you clam up? Do you shut down? Do you keep people away? Or do you at times lash out, get kind of a little snippy-snappy with your team of people around you? One way or the other, you’ve gotta handle stress. Recognizing what your natural state is is super helpful.
The last one is decision-making. Are you kind of impulsive and instinctive in the way you make decisions? Or are you somebody who waits and waits and waits and waits trying to get in more information and more information? By the way, there are times when more information is super helpful and impulsive, quick reactive decision-making is not a good answer. Sometimes it’s the opposite.
So those are the six elements that you need to think about when you’re assessing your leadership style. And to be a successful leader and to grow as a leader, you need to learn to adapt your style. So basically once you understand where you sit on those different areas, you can then learn how to adapt as you need to when the situation requires it. That’s going to help you be a more powerful leader.