Know Thyself as a Leader

I am a firm believer in what Steve Jobs said: your time is limited, do not waste it living someone else's life. My real passion is that we all learn how to improve every aspect of our lives, deal with the challenges we encounter strategically, and divide any problem we face into its original components. To come up with a unique methodological way to deal with problems. To utilize every weapon we have in our professional and personal arsenal to face challenges and obstacles. And not allow challenges to obstruct our path towards a joyful life full of successes and achievements.

Our main goal should be to learn how to develop our leadership skills and use these skills to overcome life challenges. Each of us explores how you can define your life, draw it and plan it in a way that depends on your view of success and in a way that creates your happiness according to a unique plan based on your perspective.

The central focus of developing one's leadership skills is to know ourselves. Every one of us is a leader, even if we do not occupy a leadership position. In our lives, whether private or professional, we are categorically leaders, at least by leading ourselves.

There is constant pressure around us to improve ourselves, improve our work, improve the family to which we belong, improve any social unit we belong to. From my experience in Change Management, I believe that strategies of change management that we learn in managing businesses and projects are a vast source of information that can enable us to develop ourselves, our jobs, or institutions. Also, these strategies could be our secret weapon to improve and change the social circles that we influence.

I believe in change, continuous improvement, coaching, and training. We gradually learn to improve over time. When we change our habits and daily activities, our performance improves, and our personalities change for the better.

Continuous improvement is the opposite of radical change, that from experience, is hard to achieve, maintain and sustain. Nevertheless, change is not easy, especially significant, long-term change. For this reason, for example, in leadership sciences, we find the concept of transformational leadership, which focuses on transforming the culture of an organization and transforming the performance of ourselves and those we lead to more improved and sustainable performance.

We are leaders, whether leading ourselves or others. Natural and personal preferences affect how we interact with those around us and our situations. Our reactions in these situations are crucial, and we need to understand ourselves.

I usually use Myers-Briggs Personality Index as one of the tools to understand myself, my team, and my clients in many cases. I even used to understand my husband and kids. Furthermore, I find personality assessment tools such as Big 5, DiSC, and MBPI helpful to design a plan to change an organization's culture or any other social unit. According to Dr. Stanley D. Truskie (2010), four possible culture patterns depend on the leadership approach adopted by the leader.

The first one is the Cooperation Culture Pattern, in which the focus is on creating an atmosphere of collaboration, teamwork, and participation. In this culture pattern, the leader encourages the team to solve problems and think together.

The second pattern is Inspiration Culture Pattern, where the leader focuses on encouraging the people around them. The inspirational leader helps others understand what is required of them, define their goal in life, and feel the meaning of their life. Leaders adopting this culture pattern always focus on the positive, success, participation, appreciation, planning, development, and how they feel about themselves.

The third pattern focuses on achievement, discovery, results, excellence, and competition. In contrast, the fourth and last pattern is the Consistent Cultural Pattern, which emphasizes discipline, consistent results, rules, standards, follow-up, and measuring performance.

Not everyone will adopt the same leadership style. Moreover, we might assume different types in different situations. From experience, I have noticed that every leader might have a dominant leadership style or approach; however, they adopt other techniques depending on their personalities and situations. Successful leaders, I have encountered never assume that everyone has the exact needs.

I even noticed that I adopt different leadership styles and create cultural patterns in different situations and social circles.

In my roles as a wife and a mother, businesswoman, teacher, consultant, and volunteer, I constantly change my approach as if I have a switchboard in my brain that allows me to respond to different situations differently.

As a leader at home, I adopt an inspirational style to create a culture that motivates my children, pushes them to thrive, and focuses on empowering them when facing challenges. I focus more on creating a Cooperation culture and harmonious relationship with my husband. In my business, I focus on achievement, competition, innovation. The Achievement culture will help the team be distinguished and achieve results.

What kind of leaders are you? What pattern of culture do you create and foster within your different circles? Of course, we might - to some extent - integrate two or more of these styles. For example, we inspire others and plant strong beliefs and harmonious ideas. We emphasize common values, goals, and a spirit of assistance.

When I know myself and know the natural innate differences between my style and the people's behavior, I will know how I can change this pattern and this approach to correspond to the situation in which I am in. When I understand how they get energy compared to how I get energy, I can understand how to deal with their introversion/extroversion. When I know how we get information, I can modify my communication style to cater to different people.

Of course, these preferences make each of us different from the others, and the leadership style that I have is different from the leadership styles that someone else has. That is why today, let us spend some time exploring ourselves, reflecting on our personal preferences and tendencies and naturalness, and understanding the impact of these preferences and natural tendencies on the social circles we belong to.

References

Truskie, S. D. (2010). Leadership in High-Performance Organizational Cultures. Moon Township: MSD Leadership Consultants Inc.