Games You Don't Have to Play

To Lead Others Well, First Know Yourself

So your years of hard work and product expertise have finally been recognized, and you've been promoted to Senior Manager. Now you have 10 people under your supervision.

You know the business like the back of your hand. It's just these "people issues" keep taking all your time. What do you do?

Get out your Harvard Business School guide to managing others? Work harder, hoping they will follow your lead? How about using your "phone a friend" lifeline? Or you could become an authoritarian and "whip those people into shape."

What if I told you that the best way to truly lead others -- not just manage them -- is to first get to know yourself?

That's right. Self-awareness first. It's a simple truth, really. And it has worked for literally hundreds of executives and managers I've dealt with in my 23-plus years in the leadership and organizational development business. You see, the greatest challenge the leader will have is to effectively lead him/herself. This is called self-awareness, and it is the hallmark of successful leadership. The tried and true concept is that leaders are successful in directing others in much the same way they are successful in leading themselves, and they will fail in much the same way they fail in leading themselves. It is self-awareness that will transform management into leadership.

What is self-awareness?

The basic premise of self-awareness is that each of us is responsible for and creates our own life experience. This is a complex process that can be seriously hampered if you are unconscious of how you operate, or if you have a misconception of yourself. Many use rationalization to give themselves good and justifiable reasons for why they act the way they do. You may pretend if there is a problem, it is not with you but is with the other person. This is called projection. These defense mechanisms keep you unaware of your interpersonal leadership impact. Any misunderstanding about your "self" at this level will have significant effects on your role as a manager, parent, professional, and/or partner. The need here is to discover and develop who you really are, not who others think you should be, and not even who you think you should be. But who you really are. And how well you control your life, lead others, and function in relationships depend on how well you utilize the strengths and recognize the weaknesses you discover in your "self."

So how is this accomplished? Basically in three steps. To become self-aware you must:

Take a look at the knowledge, beliefs, and feelings you already have, and understand how they are affecting your life;
Thoroughly explore the repetitive behavior patterns, and the origins and consequences of those behaviors you have created;
And with the awareness you gain, make conscious decisions to change these things, if need be, in ways that can make your leadership and life more rewarding.

Notice I did not say these were "three easy steps." That is because getting to know yourself sometimes is not an easy task. It can be difficult, even painful to do. Perhaps issues and events that we have "buried" for a long time will come to the surface. Sometimes we begin to see ourselves as others do, and it may not be a pretty picture. Sometimes we discover that it's not the ocher person who is holding us back or keeping us down, but our very own personalities and behaviors that are barriers to our success.

Maybe you learned a leadership style from a book, a seminar, or a former manager. Often that leadership style is conflicting with your own personality. Self-awareness counteracts this dilemma because it's essentially about who you and the people you're trying to lead really are. Great leaders are able to tap into what ultimately matters to people -- their needs, their beliefs, and values. Once this is discovered, executing change or even day-to-day activities becomes a much smoother process.

What the best leaders additionally can do is use their five senses to perceive a person's needs and employ these perceptions in moving individuals toward the visions and goals of the organization. They learn to understand and compensate for a set of filters that data and facts go through to get to the heart of the matter. Great leaders must draw from their own personal history, experiences, values and failures to impact and motivate their followers. The ability to do this arises from self-awareness.

It would be easy to go on forever with hundreds of self-awareness success stories I have witnessed over the years, but here is one illustration.

There was an international consultant who came to us from one of the Big Five accounting firms, to attend a Self-Awareness Workshop. He was a hard-charging, task-oriented, goal-oriented executive who, although being quite effective in many ways, was not at all successful as a leader. Why? He wanted to know. He stated in the opening session that he got good numbers, he was very productive, his team was productive, as well. "Once my team got behind in a project, and I took the whole team, rented a whole floor in a New York hotel, and they did not leave the hotel room until they finished the project. That's how committed I am," he said, as he drove his thumb into the table with each point.

That was the way he started the program. It soon became clear that at the self-awareness level, at the interpersonal leadership level, his problem was what Harry Levinson, the Harvard psychologist and founder of the Levinson Institute called the "abrasive personality." A lot of anger was coming forth because he grew up in the kind of family where there was a lot of anger expressed on a constant basis. For him it was the norm.

He now found himself in the midst of a culture that was very team oriented and participative, and where it was part of the cultural norm to be diplomatic, and tactful, and to confront people without blowing them away. In going forward with this Self-Awareness Workshop, what he discovered was that compared to the general population, his aggression scores on the personality and leadership styles profiles were significantly higher than the normal population, and significantly above 90% of the others in the workshop.

So he had a moment of truth -- a blinding flash of the obvious.

He saw clearly, as he never had before, that what had been normal to him in his life to this point was not abnormal, but was not in sync with or acceptable for the cultural norms of the leadership environment he was now in. He was driving away the best and brightest the company had spent a great deal to bring in, and those he was attempting to lead. His management team could not allow this to continue.

The next logical question is what happened once he became aware of what was getting in his way? How was this lifelong, learned behavior altered?

Self-awareness technology taught him how to control his temper -- how to transform his anger into a more constructive dialogue with other people. This enabled him to finally establish followership in his team rather than inciting them to leave as before, taking their talents and contributions with them.

What this illustrates is that leadership is a psychological/emotional process. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote that "the great decisions of human life have as a rule more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness." In other words, how we are and how we lead others have a lot more to do with our instincts and subconscious than with reason and common sense or formal training.

How do you gain awareness of self and others -- the prime ingredient for team leadership? Use the READ-FEED-LEAD process. The most important person to Read-Feed-Lead is you. Secondly, you must Read-Feed-Lead your followers. Here's how it works:

Read the person. Personality profiles help assess those individuals you're dealing with. Or in the absence of formal testing, get to know the individual -- their successes and failures. You may then discover their motivations and can tap into them for bringing out the best in the person.

Feed back to the person your message, purpose, or intention to work with, support, or assist this person in the language of the person. Use words and actions to feed the needs of the follower.
Lead the person to assist you in accomplishing the task, mission, or goal you've set out to accomplish.

Your goal is to Read-Feed-Lead your "self" into the "best of you," that emotional state of you in which you feel peaceful, powerful, and focused. The essence of our self-awareness technologies is to use what is within yourself -- your mind, body acid emotions -- to get to your "power zone." In that place, you feel powerful and totally engaged.

Leadership is essentially an intrapersonal management process. The more you understand about you, the more you're going to understand about other people. And it is not something that can be learned overnight. It is a continual learning process honed by tough experience and a boldface look at reality. Many individuals in managerial positions, once they achieve that status or have acquired an MBA, stop learning, growing, developing. The most effective leaders, however, are continually developing their abilities, honing their skills, and seeking new and innovative ways to do their jobs. John F. Kennedy said, "Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other."

And learning about ourselves first, is paramount to the true leadership of people.

This article appeared in Business Life Magazine, July 2000 issue and Personal Excellence Magazine, August 2000 issue.