Understanding Your Subconscious Leadership Style
November 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I’ve been trying to be intentional about my personal leadership style. How do I operate in a team? What do I bring to the table?
There are many different kinds of leaders, and many different ways to be successful–I’m not looking to fit into some pop leadership coaching ideal. I want to be myself, just more effective. I want to accentuate and leverage my strengths, and work with people who can get around my weaknesses.
This is very challenging to do. We humans are mostly invisible to ourselves. Leadership happens in the 1,000 little decisions we make everyday–not just the big, obvious ones we make several times a month. Thus, most acts of leadership are unintentional, subconscious acts. That’s sort of scary, right?
Here are some useful questions shared with me in my Vistage group. They are designed to help you become aware of your subconscious (i.e., authentic and lived) leadership style.
In general, what do you do?
- Confront or avoid?
- Reward loyalty or reward performance?
- Take the low road, if competitors take the low road, or take the high road?
- Promote from within or seek talent outside the company?
- Invest in the company or harvest the company?
- Meet the company’s needs or the customer’s needs?
- Plan or react?
- Share information or withhold it?
- Pursue quality or expediency?
- Emphasize participation or centralized control?
- Lead the market or follow the market?
- Operate by the numbers or by your “gut”?
- Weed people out by survival of the fittest or support people and help develop their unique contribution?
- Operate in the mode of “lean and mean” or “the best of everything”?
- Stand for something, or go with the flow?
- Trust people or look over their shoulders?
- Create a personal or professional atmosphere?
- Foster independence or interdependence in your people?
- Lead in a way that is “hands-on” or “hands-off”?
Were any of these particularly hard? If so, why?
Do you see yourself accurately enough to know your default leadership responses? It would be really interesting to complete this yourself, then ask someone who works very closely with you to circle how they think you operate on a pre-thought basis.
Here are some I struggled with: quality vs. expediency, confront or avoid, “lean and mean” or “best of everything,” and weed people out by survival of the fittest or support people and help develop their unique contributions.
Where is this coming from?
December 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
We do performance reviews at the end of the year. As part of that process, I decided to start writing a job description.
It turns out that the title Chief Operations Officer isn’t really meaningful–It begs a description.
I also spent a lot of time reflecting on things I had learned, mistakes I’ve made, and things that went really well. I realized that by writing some of this stuff down, I would have a better understanding of what I do and maybe help some other people are in similar positions of trying to figure stuff out one week at a time.
I also set up a lot of goals for the coming year. Hopefully, this blog will help keep me honest. 
- Train and delegate a significant chunk of my current workload each month. I started this in 2010, but I want to do even more in 2011. It’s part of my over all goal to leverage myself better as the company grows.
- Be more transparent about the work I’m doing.
- Workout more, obviously.
- Help grow the people around me into leaders so that I have a team of people I can count on to take projects and run with them in the year ahead.
- Read more books (not blog posts), and watch less bad netflix movies.
- Do more creative activities–arts for arts sake. I used to paint and play piano. I’ve let a lot of that stuff slide in favor of more productive activities. I regret that.
- Find new ways to maximize quality time with loved ones. I work a lot and I want to keep that up. This means I need to be more efficient in order to assure that the free time I have can be spent with the people I love.
Let’s see how this goes, shall we?
