Mastering Self-Awareness: The Key to Effective Leadership.

Having a degree gets you an entry through the door. But what keeps you hired and thereafter climb the ladder of your organization encompasses a range of qualities that young leaders need to possess.

Do you have it in you to be noticed by your leadership?

All leaders have one common attribute, their ability to emotionally connect with people, hence having a high degree of emotional intelligence (EI) (Goleman, 2004). Therefore in your journey, from a budding leader to a leader with greater influence, your emotional connections with others will set you apart. Technical skills give you the entry ticket to be part of an organization but the emotional connection will keep you growing leaps and bounds within the organization.

‘Emotional Intelligence is defined as the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as recognize and influence the emotions of others (Goleman, 2004). But let's be clear that you want to be emotionally intelligent and not emotional. An overtly emotional person can jeopardize their performance. However, an emotionally intelligent person who has control over his/her emotions and brings in the heartfelt emotions such as -empathy, appreciation and care while dealing with self and others is considered as a valuable asset on the team. (Braden, n.d.).?

Leaders look for budding leaders who are emotionally intelligent with the ability to lead self and manage relationships.

1. Ability to Lead Self

Leadership is all about leading a team of people who can meet organization goals and assist in growing, not only the organization, but themselves as well. Budding leaders, aspiring to reach leadership heights, therefore, should first be successful in leading themselves. This can be done through a 3-step process:?

● ? Self- Awareness

● ? Exercise Self- Control

● ? Continuous Self-Improvement

i. Self-Awareness

People with high self-awareness recognize how their emotions affect them, affect others and their own performance. On a daily basis, people are faced with stressful situations. It could be a leader who micromanages everything, over-opinionated team members or personal issues at home. Furthermore, environmental factors such as the pandemic can really affect the mental peace of a person. So it becomes even more important for budding leaders to be aware of their responses to situations.?

?As a budding leader, you can improve your self-awareness in the following ways:

• Weekly self-retrospective on self-performance (what went ? well and what did not),?
• Regularly get feedback from others such as your boss, teammates, family members,
• Integrate feedback with self-assessment to improve self in the following week,

ii. ? Exercise Self-Control

All human beings have a threshold of stress beyond which stress becomes detrimental to performance. Stress can result in limiting behaviors such as impulsive reaction to situations, short tempers, biases etc which can negatively impact relationships and performance. Basically, the moment you react without thinking, you are ‘emotionally hijacked’. Hence, budding leaders should be conscious of their thoughts, feelings and emotions and how best to exercise self-control.

Self-control comes from self-awareness and openness to improve one's own response to a situation so that corrective actions can be taken to avoid repetition of such behaviour.?

?Some of measures that budding leaders can take to exercise self-control are as follows:??

• Align your core values to the decisions
• Be accountable of your behaviour/emotions/reactions
• Practice Mindfulness

?iii. ? ? Continuous Self-Improvement

Self-improvement is a continuous process for all, especially so for budding leaders. Successful leaders are lifelong learners (Maxwell, 2015) and they seek the same qualities from budding leaders- people who are teachable and willing to self-improve. Self-improvement can be done on a daily basis in conventional or unconventional ways by aligning your core values and your goals to your daily habits.?

?When values, goals and good habits are aligned, it results in a person becoming the best version of themselves through continuous self-improvement.

?Another key aspect of emotional intelligence in leadership focuses on?

2. ‘Relationship with Others’:

• Being Empathetic towards others
• ?Relationship Building
• Managing Conflict?

?a. Being Empathetic towards others

As a budding leader, apart from managing your own emotions, you need to develop empathy. ‘Empathy is the ability to experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions, or experiences of others' (Gentry, Todd & Sadri, 2007). Empathy is ranked as the number one leadership skill sought in leaders and those who displayed empathy performed 40 percent higher in coaching, engaging and decision-making (Gentry, Todd & Sadri, 2007).?

Hence, by considering others perspectives and views, you are able to communicate ideas, thoughts, and action plans in an effective manner.?

Budding leaders can develop empathy-building skills in the following ways:

• ??Focus on listening to people, to their pains and concerns and try to handle the situation without emotionally getting involved and resolving it non-judgmentally
• Ask quality questions and be open to different perspective,
• Communicate with openness, assertiveness to work, accept challenges and deliver as promised.

???????2. Relationship Building

Leadership is all about building connections with people to influence, coach, persuade, lead etc. Similarly, as a budding leader, you need to invest time in building relationships with colleagues, team members, superiors, colleagues from other departments as well as clients. Building a relationship takes time and effort but leaders know that time invested in building relationships pays off manifolds in the long term. It creates trust in the relationship, builds credibility and showcases a person’s character-integrity, team player etc. Hence, as a budding leader, invest time in building relationships with others. The interactions should be built on the foundation of Integrity and similar principles and as both parties witness growth and success, this relationship turns into strategic partnerships, and eventually both sides benefit and grow together. It starts with mutual respect, which gradually ripens into a long term relationship.

Budding leaders can work on building relationship within the organizations and with customers in the following ways:

• Be Transparent
• Deliver on Commitments
• Build Trust

Therefore, as a budding leader, continue to give due importance to building and managing relationships, because it is people and not perfect jobs, that lead to satisfaction and happiness.?

3. Manage Conflict

Conflict is part of human nature and change is generally a catalyst that triggers conflict. Emotionally intelligent Leaders have the ability to manage difficult situations and steer the team/clients back on path. For example, with ever changing market needs and increasing consumer-business demands, organizations have to continuously evolve by adopting modern technologies and executing innovative ideas to achieve the set expectations. Organizations have seen exponential changes especially during the pandemic by re-imagining and re-aligning business functions to cater to needs of internal stakeholders as well as external stakeholders such as customers.

Re-alignment requires leaders to bring in changes to achieve desired goals. This in turn requires enormous amounts of human-human interactions. Whenever there is more than one person involved, it means probability of interpersonal, group to group conflicts. Having conflicts is good, as it allows a broader perspective. However, if conflicts are not managed, they lead to inefficiency and unproductivity.

Hence, as a budding leader, take the opportunity to show the leadership that you are open to change and have the ability to see potential conflict areas in the changes introduced and capability to make quick decisions to resolve the conflict by ensuring team synergy.

?Budding leaders can develop and practice conflict management strategies in the following ways:

• Analyse information non-judgmentally and unbiased,?
• Isolate the main issue and then break it down into smaller problems,
• Set the tone of problem-solving/solution mindset among the team.

The journey of leadership starts with a mindset to influence people but to be able to influence people you need to win their hearts before winning their minds. So as a budding leader develop emotional intelligence which is a learnable skill as that will give you the ability to lead self and build relationships with others.?

Kiran deep Sandhu: As a Leadership Coach with the John Maxwell Team, I work with talented leaders to build their communication skills and to deliver with greater confidence, clarity and credibility and it all starts with a growth mindset. FOR MORE INFORMATION, contact me Kiran@leadershipkard.com

Braden, M. (n.d.), 'Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Leading with the whole brain', MSB Coach Leadership Resource, viewed on 7 June 2021, available on https://msbcoach.com/images/whitepapers/LeadingwithEmotionalIntelligence_Braden2016.pdf

Gentry, W.A., Todd, J & Sadri, G. (2007), 'Empathy in the workplace: A tool for effective leadership', Center for Creative Leadership, viewed on 6 June 2021, available on https://cclinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/empathyintheworkplace.pdf

Goleman, D. (2004), 'Emotional Intelligence: What makes a leader?, Harvard Business Review, viewed on 7 June 2021, available on https://hbr.org/2004/01/what-makes-a-leader

?Maxwell, J.C. (2015), The Complete 101 Collection: What Every Leader Needs to Know. USA: HarperCollins Leadership