Self-awareness is a critical component of true leadership. It is nearly always a precursor to a leadership role in an organization. When someone ends up in a powerful position of authority, we expect a certain level of self-awareness and self-mastery. If that is lacking, it is immediately noticeable.
Joe Scherrer of The Leadership Forge put together this infographic to share the elements of self-awareness and the power of leadership presence.
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“Self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards being a champion.” -Billie Jean King
Building a world-class team is the job of a great leader. Share a few tips you’ve learned about building great teams.
Teamwork is more common as a buzzword than as an actual practice. Without benefit of nuance, teamwork is one of those catch-all terms often extended as the magic elixir for the moment’s most pressing execution issue. In a bid to boost performance, teamwork is touted in corporate vision statements, on wall posters, T-shirts, key chains, and coffee mugs. Teamwork is the subject of banal pep talks by goofy managers in TV sitcoms (The Office comes to mind). Teamwork has been given a bad name by a world of bad practitioners.
But when we’re strategic about putting both the team and the work into teamwork, beautiful things can happen.
Here’s a helpful metaphor. The suspension bridge is one of the most impressive accomplishments of modern engineering. It begins as individual wires not much stronger than the ones you’d use to hang pictures on your living room wall. Spun together, these individual wires become strands. Then several of the larger strands are combined into giant wire rope or cable that can bear thousands of tons of weight and safely cross obstacles like canyons and rivers.
This same principle is part of the marvelous results that can be produced by genuine teamwork. Ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things when they discover strength in unity.
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“Some people hesitate in speaking up to avoid being ostracized or being viewed as ‘not a team player.’” – Rodger Dean Duncan
A team is most likely to be effective when five conditions exist:
1. It’s a real team, not just a team in name only.
A collection of people is not necessarily a team. In this context, “team” is used to describe a carefully selected group of people who work interdependently, who are mutually supportive, and who bring out the best in each other as they strive to accomplish a set of specific goals.
Composition matters, and more is not necessarily better. Go for quality over quantity.
Since it is so central to your area of study and expertise, would you start by talking about the importance of peers. Why does it matter more than ever?
Trust in our institutions is low across the board (business, government, media and even non-governmental organizations) — because of this, it creates a vacuum. If we can’t trust our institutions, where else do we turn? For example, in the workplace, employees were found to trust their co-workers more than either the CEO or any of the senior leadership team members (Edelman Trust Barometer). When we lack trust in our institutions, and the people who lead them, we look to one another for reliable counsel. It’s why in today’s environment, our peers matter more than ever. It also points to why it’s so essential for leaders to communicate horizontally as well as vertically. The biggest influencers in today’s organizations are not always identified by job title. In an era where creating “alignment” is the challenge of the day in so many of today’s companies, getting ALL your key influencers involved early and often is essential to making real alignment possible.
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“Who you surround yourself with matters.” -Leo Bottary
What is the Aspen Effect and what does it teach us about leadership?
The Aspen Effect speaks to a phenomenon in nature. We see individual Aspen trees, yet it’s not evident they share a common root system and that thousands of Aspen trees can be one organism. We are all connected. If we thought of ourselves more often in terms of being part of a larger whole, we would be more successful more often.
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“We need our peers more than ever. The less we trust institutions, the more we must rely on one another.” -Leo Bottary
