Be A Better Leaders By Being Your Best Self!

The 20th book that I’ve read this year is another insightful reference on leadership, one of area that I am interested most and very relevant for my line of work as an HR Professional. The book is titled “The Leader You Want To Be: Five Essential Principles for Bringing Out Your Best Self--Every Day” by Amy Jen Su from Harvard Business Review Press. This book offers a whole-person approach that addresses a leader’s external and internal worlds. Quoted fro the book: “An effective leadership must attend not only to a leader’s external world of effectiveness—things like results, progress and output—but also to the leader’s internal world—drivers, motivations and influences. Any leadership approach that will sustain you over the course of a career as you continue to grow and take on bigger roles requires a deep, honest look inward as well as an outward gaze to remain mindful of your impact.” I do share the same opinion with those statements and if you’re also in the same ground, then this book will be a perfect reference for you. If you’re not, perhaps this book can change your mind. 

There are five concrete, practical and easy to use principles that organized i a simple yet holistic framework called the five Ps. Below are the brief summary of each P taken from the book:

The first is PURPOSE: Remain grounded in your passions and contributions. It takes conviction to ensure you are doing your highest and best work and that your work has meaning and making a different.

• Contribution is about the value you’re adding, the impact you’re having, and the difference you’re making. It’s best captured in the simple question: What is your highest and best use? There are both tangible (technical or functional expertise, deliverables and results) and intangible (thought leadership and strategy, influence, presence and visibility). 
• Passion is about the motivation, energy, and inspiration that fuels the action. If we think of contribution as our highest and best use, passion is our highest and best juice. Passion is what brings you inspiration, enjoyment, and excitement in your work. 
• Based on the passion and contribution matrix, there is 2x2 purpose quadrants that can be used as a practical tool that accounts for your energy and motivation, as well as a way to categorize the litany of demands you face each day. 

• Quadrant I: Prioritize. This is the sweet spot of your job. Items in Quadrant I reflect the highest value for your contributions as well as your highest passion. These are the parts of your job that bring you energy, joy and impact, and this is where you’re most likely to feel a sense of purpose and that you’re making difference. 
• Quadrant II: Tolerate. These are parts of our role that we know are important but don’t exactly inspire us. In some cases, these parts of of the job never did inspire us, and in other cases, we’ve become bored with them or have outgrown them.
• Quadrant III: Elevate. It is the parts of the job that you really love, but other people don’t see these things as your highest contribution. The passion is there but the value is unclear. You need to elevate the value of your idea, task, or activity. It may be time to share and roadshow what you’re seeing out on the horizon that fuels your conviction, and make the case for why it’s good not only for you but also for the organization. 
• Quadrant IV: Delegate, Hire, or Eliminate. This quadrant is about chopping wood. This is where we get caught up in the churn of activities that are lower value and don’t produce energy, leaving us on the way to burnout. Where possible, you should delegate our outsource these activities or make the case for a new hire. The ideal scenario is your Quadrant IV is someone else’s Quadrant I.  

The second is PROCESS: Rely on daily practices and routines that honor your natural energy, rhythms, enhance performance, save time, help you restore and provide critical guard rails that keep you on point.

• Process looks very different from one person to the next. It’s important to create processes grounded in who you are and the role you are in now. Consider your relationship to process and structure and whether you are someone who naturally gravitates to it or resists to it. 
• Proactively protect your time by looking back at your passion-contribution matrix above and set up your calendar yo protect your highest and best activities—including color coding, power hours, look-aheads, time zones and home zones.
• Research has validated the importance of restoration and recovery to our performance. Having a portfolio of processes—from more passive forms to active ones—to restore and recharge your energy is important. Set up rituals that give you a better shot of getting rest and sleep, that relieve tension, or that help you experience a greater sense of freedom so you can keep the battery recharged. 

The third is PEOPLE: Raise your game by raising the game of others at work and at home. Increase your resilience with healthier boundaries and rules of engagement with others. 

• You can raise your game while raising the game of others by taking a good hard look at the teams you lead, either directly or indirectly. Regularly examine the strength, structure, and composition of your team, making sure you have the right people on the bus. Get ahead of the curve on succession planning so you set in place a virtuous cycle: as you continue to grow and free yourself to take on new things, and then they in turn can help others grow and take on new things. As you move from being a leader of tasks to leader of a team to a leader of leaders, continually optimize the way you leverage, empower, and inspire those you work with. 
• Build a strategic network of support to ensure you have what you need for both your performance and well-being by getting ore comfortable asking help, considering they types of people you need to support your leadership and life (experts; sausage makers—someone who we could talk to through big decisions; accountability buddies—someone who knows what you want to achieve and helps you get there by checking in milestones; mirrors—someone who can identify your blind spots and reflect back you what they see; helicopters—this who provide an aerial view, help you see the world differently, or help you to connect your daily work to the bigger picture or longer-term horizon; cheerleaders—tho who you can always rely to provide acknowledgment, pep talk or a pat in the back; safe harbors—someone whom you can share your ideas, thoughts, and observations without judgment or retribution).
• If you find that you support others to the point of stress, exhaustion or feeling overwhelmed, look at your current boundaries and rules of engagement. This will mean getting increasingly comfortable with bringing attention your own needs, being clear on what actually yours to own in terms of emotion and accountabilities, and learning to hold boundaries and respond to incoming requests with greater grace and clarity. 

The fourth is PRESENCE: Strengthen your inner capacity to pause between stimulus and response, so matters of effectiveness and impact drive decisions and actions, rather than old habits or knee-jerk impulses.

• Presence helps us to keep our focus and attention to move forward important goals, increases our emotional resilience to tolerate what may be uncomfortable in the short term to learn new patterns and practices that create and sustain long term-progress, and build our inner capacity to pause between stimulus and response to make more thoughtful, wise decisions. 
• You can get present quickly so that distraction and procrastination don’t get better of you by (1) choosing to work off-line, (2) bring your focus from the mountain to the molehill and taking single steps, (3) giving yourself fifteen minutes to get into a flow, (4) staying anchored in the physical, or (5) using a grounding visualization technique to quickly bring attention and focus on the present moment.
• You can shift to more virtuous and positive cycle by using the practice of (1) spectating and observing the patterns at play, (2) finding and extending the “pause” time between stimulus and response through greater self-regulation, and (3) adapting by creating new if-then patterns and choosing the best leadership action or voice for the situation at hand. This helps to break reactive patterns or vicious cycles that burn up energy, waste time and lead to ineffectiveness and dissatisfaction.

The fifth and the last is PEACE: Learn to trust your capacities to evolve, adapt, and respond to whatever comes your way. Lead from a place of acceptance, gratitude, and trust, rather than a place of stress, striving and ego protection.

• Peace doesn’t need to be abstract or soft concept. You can use the acronym of ACT as a reminder to incorporate peace into your leadership experience. The A is about accepting the moment so you can save time and energy by taking constructive and effective action for what’s within your control with more ease and acceleration. The C is about being content in the moment, knowing what’s enough and bringing more of an attitude of gratitude. The T is increasing your trust in yourself and life, knowing that you’ve achieved, learned and grown, and you will again.
• As you increase your acceptance, contentment, and trust, your leadership actions stem less from a need to prove yourself, self preserve, or one-up others or yourself in some way. Leadership actions are then able to flow more consistently from a set of core principles that benefit not only the leader but their teams and organization as well.
• Leaders at peace have the humility to know what’s enough, the gratitude to see that it’s all enough, and the peace within to know that they are enough.
• As leaders develop a strong and healthy internal sense of self, they find that all the focus on honoring oneself shifts to the ability to transcend oneself. The concept of transcend is what I will learn and share more in my next article.  

Purpose is what we, in Growth Center Kompas Gramedia, currently try to focus more by incorporating it in the growth conversation with every employee. I do believe that the process and people part are things that usually already included in every leadership model and development on each organization, including ours. Our mindfulness program initiative should have been covered in our mindfulness program. This book provides us with many insightful suggestions to improve our leadership practices that will hopefully will enable our leaders to provide more and better impact not only to our organization but also to this nation.

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