What is Your Personal Leadership Process?

If you want people to follow you, you must know where you’re going.

If you’re in the first five years of your leadership position, chances are you’re doing a lot of learning on the go, but?not?following a roadmap that clearly defines your objective, your next steps, and your guiding mission.

Without a roadmap, how can you tell where you’re really headed? And more importantly, how do you know if you’re going the?right?way?

Don’t panic –?you’re in the right place, and it’s not too late!

In fact, developing a solid leadership process early on in your career puts you at a huge advantage over peers who’ve never done the work to develop one.

You will need to learn and maintain the building of many different types of skills throughout your leadership journey – but mastering your self-awareness and internal processes early on will give you a guiding light to follow when you’re struggling with new leadership challenges and skill sets.

Once you’ve developed and are following your own leadership process, you’ll be able to answer these questions with confidence:

What is your main objective in your current role as a leader?

What would you like to get really, really good at as a leader?

What is a step you can take every day to feel as if you’re getting closer to that future vision of leadership?

What can you earmark as a “key performance indicator” to let you know you’re headed in the right direction?

What is a ‘leadership process’?

Organizations throw a lot of money at ‘leadership training’ ($166 billion US annually, in fact!) but is it helping?

If the Great Resignation is any indicator, it doesn’t really seem like it.

Or, at the very least, the?real root problems?are not being addressed, and when economic and societal pressure is added to the crumbling foundation, the institution of traditional leadership collapses.

What this?really?means is that leaders aren’t being developed on these five important traits:

1. Self-Awareness
2. Accountability
3. Integrity
4. Curiosity and Daring
5. Effective Communication

These are the real cornerstone traits of a courageous, effective leader.

But these traits aren’t just easily accessed and built upon.

A leader has to know herself really, really well from the inside out in order to know how to build these traits and improve her leadership capacity.

And it doesn’t end there. I’ve watched corporations waste millions of dollars on leadership training that’s “one-and-done”; they send their leaders off to a conference in Las Vegas, train them on leadership practices, and then expect those same leaders to have mastered these practices when they return to their work lives.

But they’re called?practices?because leaders have to?practice?them every day, and follow a roadmap so they know if the practice is taking them where they want to go.

When my daughter was young, she had a bit of a temper when she didn’t get her way. She would throw a fit and expect that somehow that would help her cause.

If I had said to her, “You need to learn that getting mad isn’t helping you to get what you want”, she wouldn’t have understood or agreed – because sometimes it?did?work.

Like any parent, there were times when I decided it was easier to just give her what she wanted instead of stretching my patience any thinner. It wouldn’t have made sense to say, “don’t do that, because it doesn’t work,” because, in her experience, it did give her what she wanted sometimes. It just wasn’t the best way for her to get what she wanted. And sometimes, what she wanted wasn’t what was best?for her.

Instead, I had to help my daughter learn about the best possible outcome (her getting what she wanted without upsetting anyone)?and?to understand that sometimes what she wanted wasn’t good for her or what she needed.

The way I did this was by helping her to understand the situation better. When she asked, “But why?” I’d explain it to her. I explained how she made other people feel when she threw fits. I helped her understand where her anger came from, the beliefs that made her feel angry – things like, “This isn’t fair!” I helped her to understand how to calm down her red-hot anger and use her words to express her needs.

And most importantly, I made sure she understood that knowing these things and using them to try something different would help her a lot more than just getting mad.

As she understood herself better and started to communicate more, she found that she really did have better outcomes: a happy mom,?sometimes?getting what she wanted – and once in a while, the most magic of outcomes – getting something even better than what she initially wanted because she was patient and calm.

This might seem like an elementary example, but the principle is the same in the adult world of work and leadership:?when we understand ourselves better, we receive better outcomes in the world.

Having a solid leadership process is like holding the cheat codes for effective communication, seamless conflict resolution, high-output delegation, and team-building.

So… where should you start?

I’ve spent the past 24+ years coaching leaders, teams, and organizations in courageous leadership practices. My approach is different from many of the executive leadership programs and training available because I believe the real key to effective leadership is to?start by looking inwards.

Follow this link to download Unlocking The Power of Courageous Leadership ?– your comprehensive guide for your character and pulling out your own formula for Courageous Leadership.

This is the kicking-off point for a lot of real lasting change in your leadership trajectory. You have the power to be a standout example of what courageous leadership looks like – so jump in with me and let’s take a dive!

– Belinda Egan