Why Is Effective Leadership So Difficult To
Pin Down?
So many books have been written about the subject addressing many of the
important facets that the act of leadership demands; clarity of vision,
strategic thinking, high level management skills, cultural acuity, influence and emotional intelligence, to name
a few.
I find
that the most challenging aspect of training up the leadership ranks in an
organization lies in the work around emotional intelligence. A leader’s emotional intelligence is tied
directly to their ability to create influence within the ranks and to build a
high functioning culture. Though these
“soft skills” may be considered secondary to basic skills of good management by
some, emotional intelligence tends to be much harder to teach on an individual
level and imbed within teams.
Why is it
so difficult to teach? Three words:”
honest self-observation.” It requires
developing within oneself the “Observer;” this is the honest broker within each
of us that tends to steer us in the right direction by witnessing our behaviors
and thoughts and their impact on our surroundings. The Observer exists in all of us; one may
consider it the voice of our conscious, the whisper of our intuition.
The
challenge we all face is that more often than not we don’t pay attention to
this voice; we choose to either consciously ignore it, or by course of habit,
we turn its volume so far down that we can’t hear it. The loss of clear access to this voice over
time begins to blind us to our impact on our environment and those around us;
as leaders we begin to risk creating the positive influence we seek in our
organization and over time we risk becoming less and less effective in how we
lead.
When we
talk about “leadership”, we are addressing the issue of how someone can lead
people, be it individuals or teams. Technical
skills aside, a leader’s primary job is to influence and impact the people
around them in positive directions towards the business goals that need to be
met. What differentiates an effective
leader from a mediocre one are the skills inherent in their emotional
intelligence, and one’s emotional intelligence is explicitly connected to how
well their inner observer is developed.
How then does one develop their inner
observer?
1.
Start
by committing to do a professional assessment, something like a 360 assessment,
once a year.
2.
Collate
the feedback and solicit someone’s help to create a plan to address the issues
found in the assessment.
3.
Follow
the plan with the support of a mentor or a coach.
4.
Begin
to notice how the issues raised in the assessment may correlate to some things
that you already were aware of within yourself, or that you may have had
indications about.
5.
Focus
on these issues and begin to pay more attention to what the voice of your inner
observer is telling you about these issues as you interact with your
colleagues.
6.
This
focus will strengthen your awareness of the observer within you; over time it
will expand your ability to hear its voice more frequently.
7.
Develop
your trust in it as you develop your willingness to listen to it and heed its
feedback.
The inner
observer is a necessary vehicle to grow our emotional intelligence, and being
emotionally skillful increases our success in influencing people in positive
and productive ways. A leader who
understands the value of their people, and in their endeavors, works
intelligently to create a positive impact will build a contagiously positive
culture where success results are the norm, not the exception.
