From Burnout to Breakthrough: Discover the Power of Conscious Leadership

What's stopping you from becoming a better leader?

We all want to achieve our greatest potential and bring our best selves to work, but sometimes unseen barriers hold us back. This week's Leadership Matters explores the concept of Conscious Leadership, a powerful approach that can help you understand yourself better, lead with greater awareness, and empower those around you.

Leading with Awareness: Slow Down to Speed Up

Imagine a leader who takes a moment to think and feel before acting.

Conscious leadership promotes this intentional pause, allowing for more thoughtful decisions and improved outcomes. By stepping back to consider the impact of your actions, you can become a more effective leader for yourself, your team, and your organisation.

• Conscious leadership is an ongoing process of self-discovery and reflection.
• By considering the impact of your choices, you can make better decisions for yourself, your team and the wider organisation.

"Conscious leaders infuse their organisation's purpose with authenticity and meaning. They make it come alive, in little ways and big ways, every day. Their passion for purpose can become a touchstone for those around them. They demonstrate and embody the "why" of an organisation. And they show a reasonable pathway to how." – John Mackey

From Silo to Synergy: The Strength of Shared Leadership

Great leaders understand that they don't have to do everything themselves – in fact, they should NOT! Conscious leadership fosters shared responsibility and collaboration. By asking questions that spark conversation and leveraging the strengths of others, you can create a team that is greater than the sum of its parts and is unified in achieving corporate goals.

• Shared leadership encourages inclusion and innovation.
• By supporting and learning from each other, teams can achieve win-win-win situations.

Case Study: The Power of Conscious Choice

We've all seen (or even been) talented leaders struggling to reach their full potential. Consider the story of a highly successful female leader who had strived to climb the corporate ladder. She had a reputation for always being the person who spoke first in meetings. While this initially boosted her visibility and helped her to build her credibility, it stifled collaboration and created undue pressure on her, creating a sense of anxiety. Through conscious leadership, she learned to hold back and encourage participation from others.

It wasn't easy; this habit had been embedded in her daily practices for a long time!

Being conscious of not being the only voice in the room and unlearning this behaviour took a new level of awareness and a conscious realisation that by changing this habit, she would give space for inclusion and diverse thinking. It also created opportunities for collaboration, resulting in a shared responsibility to deliver on the organisational goals.

The result? Reduced stress, improved teamwork, and stronger overall performance.

• Conscious leadership is about making conscious choices in the moment.
• By recognising and overcoming negative habits, you can maximise your positive impact on yourself, your team, and your organisation.
• Even well-established habits can be unlearned. Conscious leadership empowers you to identify and adjust behaviours that hinder your effectiveness or the success of your team.

Taking Action: Becoming a More Conscious Leader

Self-awareness is the foundation of conscious leadership. Here are some exercises to get you started:

• Identify your flow state: When are you most productive and focused?
• Energy Check-In: Take a moment to assess your energy levels throughout the day.
• Be conscious of your day and your energy levels. Make changes if possible. For example, avoid scheduling high-concentration tasks for times when you experience low energy, like the end of the day.

Unleashing Strengths:

By understanding your innate strengths and the strengths of those you lead and leveraging these strengths, you can create a truly effective team with a shared purpose.

Here's how:

• Self-Awareness: Reflect on your natural strengths and how you developed them. What energises you and what are your drainers? Consider tools like Strengthscope? or other personality assessments to gain deeper insights.
• Team Exploration: Open conversations with your team members about their strengths. What are they naturally good at? How can they develop those skills?
• Strength Deployment: Once you understand your team's strengths, find ways to leverage them. Who thrives on collaboration? Who excels at detail-oriented work? By assigning tasks that align with strengths, you'll unlock peak performance and create a more engaged team. Have a conversation with a colleague about their strengths and what comes naturally to them. Then, ask them what they perceive as your personal strengths. Sharing openly fosters connection and builds a more consciously led team.

Conscious leadership is a journey, not a destination. By taking these steps, you can create opportunities and empower those around you to achieve remarkable results.

Co-Creation's Conscious Leadership Programme

Through in-depth research and development, we created the Conscious Leadership Programme to equip leaders with the skills and habits they need to thrive in today's complex workplace.?

The programme highlights the importance of a leader's mindset and how it impacts your people, teams and the broader organisation. It helps you to develop your self-awareness, focus on how you individually impact others and gives practical guidance towards becoming a more impactful leader who inspires, motivates and develops people to be their best.

Ready to take it a step further? Please get in touch for more information, or to arrange a discussion with one of our Programme Directors, Liz Needham Chartered MCIPD, ACC, MA HRM and Samantha Amit ??? , to see how Conscious Leadership can transform your leadership style.