Self-Leadership: the art of cultivating your leadership skills
Even after 100 years of research, leadership development remains an important subject, both from the point of view of theorists and from that of companies.
Why is this so? Because this relationship of influence between a leader and followers is part of challenges that are increasingly marked by the need to lead change, the nature of which is evolving. From being technical and organisational, the challenges faced by today's managers require them to lead more profound transformations with and among their employees; changes in perspective, beliefs and even paradigms. These types of 'in-depth' changes are supported by the concept of transformational leadership, which is widely used in business. (Bass 1985, Bass and Avolio, 1994). But in order to collectively build new ways of seeing and doing things in others, managers have to deconstruct their own beliefs and representations about themselves as people in the role, about their actions and their results, and about the theories they use, of which they are not always aware. In short, it's an ongoing learning process that requires a great deal of psychological flexibility.
To develop their "management skills", another name for leadership often used by our Quebecois friends, managers have no use for methods and other tools of self-assertion, which are over-represented in current corporate training. What they need first and foremost is to explore what we call "the underpinnings of their leadership"; in other words, to identify what they have within them as resources for leading, so that they can draw on them when exercising their authority. Doing this work of inner exploration (which can also be combined with going back and forth with the outside world through dialogue between management professionals, for example) means recognising a certain number of strengths (desires, skills, intuitions, convictions, etc.) within yourself, not always conscious of them, so that you can honour them and exploit them more fully. It also means coming face to face with the obstacles or inhibiting beliefs that we hold in the day-to-day exercise of our influence as managers, so that we can question them more effectively and suggest that they take a step aside.
To develop their "leadership skills", managers need to identify the resources they have within them to lead, so that they can draw on them when exercising their authority.
Working on what underpins our leadership means developing what is known as Self-Leadership Agility.
We owe the concept of self-leadership to Charles MANZ (1986), who defines it as the process of establishing free self-direction and stimulating the necessary motivation to carry it out. In short, to lead oneself in order to better lead others.
Self-leadership includes not only self-awareness, as we have just seen, but also self-awareness in relation to others, i.e. the way in which we impact others and what we recognise in them. Through critical reflection, we become the driving force in shaping our environment by taking a critical view of circumstances and relationships, and then adjusting our way of being and interacting (Cunliffe, 2009).
By Self-Leadership Agility we mean the ability of proactive leaders to learn continuously from their experience - in short, a muscle to be trained for life! Agile leaders are keen to become more aware of behaviours, feelings and assumptions that generally go unnoticed; they seek feedback and experience from new ways of thinking and acting. They also strive to align their behaviour with their values and ambitions. (Joiner)
They enter into this discipline of trusting their inner resources; of making explicit to themselves what they want to do and achieve, before making it explicit to others. They authorise and re-authorise themselves every day, because as we all know, our first follower is ourselves!
