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Effective Leaders Manage Themselves Before Managing Others

Jan 22, 2020 | Business Owners, CEOs, Ethical Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Development

Effective leaders manage themselves before managing others.

Research indicates that the No. 1 reason people leave organizations is because their direct boss is incompetent. In many cases, managers in their organization have promoted people to management levels with MBA (Management by Accident).

You are the leader of your own life. Every day, you are choosing to lead or choosing to follow. Personal leadership and personal mastery are a continuous journey toward personal excellence whereby you deliberately embark to become the best version of yourself possible. To live the life of your dreams, you need to be intentional and deliberate about your own journey. Your ability to grow as a leader is based on your ability to grow as a person. Your development program should be based on sustaining daily habits that move you in the direction of your goals.

Personal leadership is the ability to lead yourself. Far too many people just let life happen to them and then suffer the consequences. They move through life on auto pilot and blame personal and business failures on circumstances. Personal leaders decide what life they want, and then make it happen through planning and a basis for action. Personal leadership mastery means continuous growth and development in all six areas of the wheel of life. It means you are living with purpose and you are goal-oriented. It is very difficult to influence others if you have difficulty leading your own self. If you want to make things happen in your company, you need to master personal leadership.

In The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner wrote: “Leadership is an art – a performing art – and the instrument is the self. The mastery of the art of leadership comes with the mastery of the self. Ultimately, leadership development is a process of self-development. The quest for leadership is first an inner quest to discover who you are. Through self-development comes the confidence needed to lead. Self-confidence is really awareness of and faith in your own powers. These powers become clear and strong only as you work to identify and develop them.”

All significant change begins with telling yourself the truth about you!

The bottom line is this: If you want to lead a successful business that achieves its goals, you must first be able to achieve your own personal goals. You set the example for your people. If you want your employees to grow and aim for continuous improvement, then you must do it first. Remember: Leadership is a modeled behavior. You must walk the walk, starting with yourself. If you want your business to grow, if you want to increase revenues and bring in new clients, then you must grow with these changes. It is not always easy to reflect on where we are compared to where we want to be.

Growth can often be painful. As leaders, it can also be easy to make excuses why we do not have the time for personal growth and development but staying stagnant will destroy you and your business. If you take the time to look at yourself regularly and apply effort to personal development, perhaps through a formal program or one-on-one with a coach like me, I promise you will see tremendous results in your personal life and in your business.

On Feb. 19, Peter Demarest and I are teaming up to deliver the Self-Leadership Breakthrough Workshop for business owners and executives who want to make 2020 a breakthrough year. Click here to register.

You Are Better Than You Think

Jan 14, 2020 | CEOs, Happiness, Leadership, Leadership Development, Success

Guest Writer, Peter Demarest, Axiogenics, LLC

As humans, we have a strong need to control things, including other people. We tend to believe that if we’re not in control of things, then we are vulnerable to being manipulated, used, hurt, or dominated and won’t succeed in getting what we want. The brain quickly habituates thought patterns and strategies associated with self-protection, well-being, and preserving or advancing our social status. Ironically, our need to be in control of things ends up taking control of us in the form of habits.

Our subconscious habits of mind dominate 85 to 95 percent of all our decisions, emotions, actions, reactions, and interactions. Many of these habits are also rooted in self-centric cognitive biases that we have subconsciously developed over time.

These cognitive biases are also the ways of thinking that tend to cause us the most trouble in our life, ranging from emotional stresses to underperformance and from relationship problems to health issues.

How much of your life (your daily choices, actions, and emotions) do you believe are either controlled by or greatly influenced by your subconscious, self-centric, need-to-control, cognitively biased habits of mind?

Researchers estimate it to be between 85 and 95 percent. Think about that a moment. On average, we are “in control” of just five to 15 percent of our thoughts, actions, and emotions. The rest of the time, we give up control of the ONE THING we can actually control – our choices – to our bias-driven, self-centric habits of mind.

Are you getting the picture?

Our need to control creates self-centric cognitive biases
Our biases become our subconscious mental habits
Our habits end up controlling us

The truth is:

You cannot control what other people think or do
You cannot control how other people think or feel about you
You cannot control the future

The only thing you can control is your conscious choices.

But you can influence all of the above by adopting a different mindset that will enable you to make more good choices.

To reclaim the full power and freedom of choice, rather than seeking control of things outside of you (which you can’t control anyway), claim control of your own thoughts. Become a self-leader; a thought-leader of your own mind.

How? Rather than focusing on maintaining control, focus on creating value. We know from neuroscience that we’re actually at our best when we are engaged in doing good things that create greater value and not just for ourselves.

The first and simplest step in adopting a “valuegenic” mindset is to make a practice of asking ourselves a question called, The Central Question of Life, Love, and Leadership:

What choice can I make and action can I take, in this moment, to create the greatest net value?

This not a rhetorical question. Let your mind do the work to answer the question. It is far more capable of answering it than you might imagine. It’s a question to ask yourself whenever you are in any state of stress, overwhelm, upset, or confusion, indecision, or procrastination – or, I dare say, when you “feel out of control.”

Great leadership begins with self-leadership. Adopting a “valuegenic” mindset with The Central Question is the first step in regain control of your own mind and becoming a master of Self-Leadership.

If you take this practice to heart, you’ll be less controlled by the need to control and, instead, be guided by the innate wisdom you already have. Your stress levels will decrease, and your performance and happiness will increase. You’ll gain a new perspective on your life and work and will be able to make meaningful and lasting changes you likely struggled to make for a long time.

As We ‘Roar’ into the 2020s, Take Time for Strategic Planning

Jan 8, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Productivity

In this “do more with less” age, everyone is under siege to improve performance at every level. In the expanding global marketplace, sustaining success is becoming increasingly more difficult.

Where will your business be in three to five years?

As the president or CEO, are you prepared to cope with the changes in the economy, the impact of global competition, and the changing demands of customers and suppliers? If there is one constant in the age in which we live, it is change and the uncertainty it brings. And this uncertainty is a fundamental reason for developing a strategy

The common question asked is: How can I develop a strategy for my company in a world where the only constant is change? Most people are averse to planning in the first place. Their biggest fear is that of setting a rigid plan that will hinder their ability to respond quickly.

I have always been a proponent that this is precisely the time you need to be proactive with a strategy. Having no strategy and a plan for implementing that strategy is like sailing a ship without a rudder, letting the wind take you where it may.

Strategy is the process of planning and thinking about how to position your company and allocate your scarce resources to optimize your success moving forward. In the current environment, you need to have a strategy to thrive; otherwise, our only motivation is survival. Peter Drucker says the best way to predict the future is to create it. I believe that, even though we don’t know how the future will unfold for all of us, we are better off having a strategic plan, so we have some idea of where we are going and why we are going there. In this day and age, we need to have a crystal-clear focus on our guiding principles, our shared values, our vision, mission, and purpose and our unique value proposition. This is a living document that is communicated throughout the organization for optimal success.

The strategic planning process is one of the most powerful tools you have in your arsenal to improve organizational focus and effectiveness. Again, no one can predict the future, but rather than sit back and wait for it to happen, the effective executive plans and anticipates what lies ahead.

A good strategic plan:

crystallizes thinking to be more proactive and gain greater clarity of priorities
creates a sustainable value proposition to gain a competitive advantage
creates shared values and guiding principles
develops a system to inspire and motivate change
aligns strategic employee intentions with company
communicates strategy to stakeholders to gain support for the plan
creates a plan of action to implement the plan and track results