How Authenticity Can Kill Engagement

Frustrated leaders lose their spark as they don't see an impact.

Emotional intelligence is a pathway to impact, but with your busy workday, there seems to be little time for self-reflection. This self-reflection can keep you motivated and fuel your passion to doing your best for the team.

Self-awareness is the most critical leadership skill to develop, but it can be challenging. Lack of self-awareness and adjusting your communication affect your relationships with your team, how they see you, how they feel supported by you, and how engaged they are. If you communicate automatically without self-awareness, thinking that you are just being yourself, you may well be stressing many of your team.

My goal is to make it easier for you to cultivate emotional intelligence and reduce your frustration with leading your team in a way that energises you and them.

A nursing director I worked with needed to be made aware of her style's impact on her team. Although she thought she was direct and efficient, others thought she was rude, judgmental, and demeaning.

This leader thought she was using Authentic leadership, being herself, and doing what came naturally. She also thought this was what was needed. Just do the task. She was reactive and didn't think about what her team needed.

Static leadership models like Authentic leadership are limited as leadership is a 'doing with' rather than a 'doing to' activity. You lead others, so you can't have a model of behaviour, trait, or skill as a leader. It's best to have a model that includes both parties: you and those you lead.

The nursing director was leading with the identity (or part) at the time was? 'cockatoo'. This part forms a bonding pattern with another part in another person. A bonding pattern describes a situation you have been in before with another person. It is an automatic response or trigger when you are interacting, and another way to look at it is if someone pushes your buttons.

In this instance, it can trigger another cockatoo, outwardly defensive communication or other parts in others that don't take responsibility for their work. This is why when awareness of the parts of yourself that make up your personality and how these parts interact with other people is the best way to improve your leadership. I outline this extensively in my book Transformational Nurse Identities: How to revolutionise Your Leadership , where you understand the parts of yourself that have developed over time.

It feels like you and is energy-saving—a well-worn path from past behaviours. This automatic response is more likely to surface when you are stressed, but the reactive part of you can reduce your team's engagement.

It is critical to sort this out as McKinsey state that one third of clinical nurses want to leave.

There is not a shortage of nurses. There is a shortage of nurses who want to work in the old conditions. In this world of disruption, the rules are changing and to keep the spark in your team, you need to understand what extinguishes it.

When you need to pause most, when there is pressure, getting the awareness you need is more challenging.

That's also why I'm creating - Transformational Leadership & culture identity cards to remind yourself each day who you don't and who you do want to be in relation to others.

The cards will remind you of your triggers, enabling you to be a deliberate leader and reduce frustration with being unable to move the dial on a positive culture.

I will launch the cards in June and am looking for several individuals and workplaces to trial the mapping process in their leadership teams so that the whole team knows who they are in different contexts and how it affects others.

Please get in touch with me to help make the cards and process extraordinary and improve your team's self-awareness, collaboration and spark.

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#Healthcare

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#Self-awareness

#Transformationalleadership

Michelle