Managing self is as important as managing others

I have noticed that leaders often want to be better at managing others. The focus is usually on how they can get someone else to be or do something but good leadership starts with self not others. When we are in a better state emotionally, physically, and mentally, we bring a better version of ourselves to work, and this, has the potential to create positive impact within your team and workplace.

To do this we need to focus on 4 aspects:

Self Awareness, Self-Leadership, Self-Alignment & Self Compassion

Self-Awareness

Know our strengths: What we do best, what we see as our strengths and what we enjoy doing.

We all have moments of brilliance when things just fall into place easily and effortlessly. Times when we felt inspired and did our best work. Recall those times to figure what happened, what were you thinking before you started, how did you approach the task, what worked for you and what made your heart sing and what didn’t ? How do you come to terms with tasks that you are not that good at doing or prefer not to do? - Is this something you need to master because it is stopping you from developing further or is this something you can get someone else to do because they are better at it. Leaders don’t need mastery at everything, but we do need be aware of when we are making excuses to excuse ourselves from not doing what we need to. We also need to be aware as to when we need to get out of the way and let people around us balance and complete us by doing things better than we can.

What am I good at doing? What can others help me with, for me to be even better? Is there something I need to learn that that will make me awesome in what I do?

Self-Leadership

Know what matters and make time for this: ?Making time for parts of our lives that we see as important such as work, family, health, friends, social work etc.

Before we can lead others, we need to lead ourselves. Self-leadership is about recognising, exercising and improving our own leadership. Bryant and Kazan (2012) defined self-leadership as “ someone having a developed sense of who they are, what they can do and where they are going. Coupled with this is the ability to influence communication, emotions, and behaviours.” Self-development, finding a mentor and being an active participant in one’s own growth is key to self-leadership. It is also important to recognise that if we are not happy in other areas of our life, it will seep into our work life and vice versa. Knowing what and who matters in our lives is somewhat underrated by workaholic leaders who do not make time for anything else outside of work.?However, doing this process of working out what matters in our lives can be a liberating and empowering process. A review of 38 studies found that adult friendships, especially high-quality ones that provide social support and companionship, significantly predict well-being and can protect against mental health issues such as depression and anxiety—and those benefits persist across the life span. Scientists studying friendship have even found similar brain activity among friends in regions responsible for a range of functions, including motivation, reward, identity, and sensory processing.

What / who matters to me? Do I make time for what matters to me? How can I set myself up for sustainable success?

Self-Alignment

Align with who we are: Understanding our core values and living in sync with it, every day.?

Self-alignment is about being clear about what we want and why, and how much we are willing to commit to it. It about doing what we say we will to do. Leaders can build a strong foundation for themselves by examining their own beliefs and values. Sometimes, it is not in our nature to do certain things and it’s important to recognise this. We often discuss team alignment but how can that happen, if the leader is not in sync with his or her own values? With Self alignment comes authenticity and this shows up in many ways. One of the most annoying ways that lack of alignment shows up in the workplace is when leaders cannot stand by their decisions or when they keep shifting and changing the direction based on what they hear from someone else. When leaders have a strong inner core, they can take in all the input from the outside and then go within and find the solution that resonates with their inner core. Many great leaders have walked in the opposite direction of what was norm to forge a new path. From my perspective, Self-alignment is about inner strength.

Do my values align to what I am doing? How can I stay true to myself and with what I am doing? What is my north star?

Self-Compassion

Being kind to ourselves: How we respond to what happens

Self-compassion builds the foundation for resilience. We don’t always know what will happen but if we have the capacity to respond to what happens through self-regulation, emotional intelligence, and empathy, we have a stronger chance of leading ourselves and our teams through tough times.

Harvard review article, ‘Self-compassion will make you a better leader’ states that “self-compassionate people have standards as high as people who lack self-compassion, but that those with high self-compassion are less likely to be unduly and unproductively hard on themselves if they didn’t meet their own standards. Self-compassion supports you as you navigate setbacks, regain clarity, and move forward productively.” The same article also states that when leaders model self-compassion it sets the stage for themselves and others to build trust, psychological safety which leads to higher levels of engagement and performance within organisations.

There’s a link between self-compassion and how we treat others, UC Berkeley professor of psychology, Serene Chen states that “Self-compassion and compassion for others are linked, being kind and non-judgmental toward the self is good practice for treating others compassionately.”?

Our day to day behaviour is a reflection of how we see the world. The thing that most people take for granted is that others can see how we see the world, through our behaviour even though some leaders think they mask this well. When I come across a leader who is harsh in his/her judgement of others, it tells me that he/she is also being harsh on himself/herself

How can I be kinder to myself? What can I do to see my inter-connectivity to others and recognise that we all have our own ‘bug bears’ to work through at different times of our lives? ?

Taking time for ourselves to look after our own development and growth is as important as important as the work we do in looking after those we manage. When leaders take time to reflect, review and renew their position, they are in effect doing a great service to the people they manage by bringing a more whole and balanced approach to their work and the people they work with. In my opinion, we have no business managing others, if we can’t manage ourselves.

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