Leadership Starts with Us

The initial intention of my Blog was to focus on Individual practices rather than Team or Leadership topics. 

Leadership & Team Development is not only part of what I will be offering in Find · Your ·Wings, it is also a passion of mine. It is my opinion that Teamwork is the single most untapped competitive advantage in many businesses, no matter the industry or the location. A strong & cohesive team will deliver better results more consistently than teams who experience conflict or mistrust.

This urge to write about Leadership has been brought about by our World Leaders who, within the context of Covid-19, are displaying abundant examples of admirable leadership characteristics, on the positive end of the scale to leaders who fail to understand the meaning of accountability, as an example of abysmal leadership. 

There is a PhD study waiting to be done on Leadership Characteristics and the correlation of the nation’s Covid-19 infection control. 

I listen to our Global leaders and find myself either admiring or bemoaning the leadership characteristics they are displaying.

This reminds me of a game I developed for teams who avoid dealing with emotions, called “Emotions Shopping”.  Individuals select blocks with positive & negative emotions written on them which defines how they feel currently, each person gets a chance to talk about the blocks they selected. The uncanny thing about this game is the correlation between their Enneagram type characteristics and the words they selected, and in a team development workshop this exercise can be most enlightening.

“Emotions Shopping”

So much like I have a bag of blocks with emotional words on them, I feel like I need a giant bag of blocks with leadership characteristics written on them. Then I wonder which blocks will these global leaders select for themselves and which blocks are they actually living out. 

Now you may be feeling that you are not a leader of an organisation or a team and so this blog does not apply to you. I disagree, one of the most important leadership characteristics is self-leadership. Brian Tracy states, “Self-leadership is the starting point of everything. Self-leadership means that you decide exactly who you are and what you want, and especially Self-leadership means you accept complete responsibility for your results and outcomes. Another definition I like comes from Bryant and Kazan, “Self-leadership is the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling and actions towards your objective/s”.

This applies to all of us, no matter how small or big our basket of responsibilities we choose to carry.

If it all starts with Self-leadership, then my question is what other leadership characteristics you will choose for yourself, not only to define your leadership style with, but which you will live out passionately & consistently, in good and in bad times.

Brené Brown states in Dare to Lead that “Leadership is not about titles or the corner office. It’s about the willingness to step up, put yourself out there, and lean into courage. The world is desperate for braver leaders. It’s time for all of us to step up.”

In these times of extreme crisis and where we all say the world will never be the same again and where there is an abundance of quotes about what that future may look like, my question to you simply is, what defines your leadership style, not in the past – that is gone, now in the present when your teams need it most, when your family & loved ones depend on it, when how you act now may fill a hungry tummy out there, which leadership blocks have you chosen for yourself now?

Leadership Characteristics

Business as usual, or as we knew it, is gone and more will be demanded of Leadership now and “post” Covid-19, than ever before. Just as we expect more of our elected Leaders, no matter what our nationality. 

Understanding ourselves, our own capacity and that of our teams will be very necessary to realize the opportunities in the unknown and uncertain environment we do, and will all live in going forward. If this triggers a thought in your mind on how to build capacity, I look forward to discussing that further with you.

Under resources I include a leadership characteristics library that I clobbered together from a multitude of articles on good leadership characteristics. I also include links to articles you may find interesting on this topic and finally I include the link to Brené Brown’s Daring Leadership Assessment, you may find the outcome interesting.

Choose your Leadership Characteristics wisely and live it out with courage & passion and perhaps use this time to contemplate what you would like that to be going forward.

Lou-Anne Lubbe

Find · Your · Wings