Take a good look at yourself
I wrote Leadershift to challenge the flow of the tide in relation to workplace-only leaders and a culture of overwork, which recent research has shown has become the norm in Australia. Indeed, we are leading the charge with grumpy old men and women at work as a consequence of this.
I developed a format for self assessment and personal and professional growth as a response, which enables people to look at how they manage themselves, their ‘priority people’, as well as their professional role.
The first step in my leadershift process involves taking a good look at your diary back over a time frame of four weeks. I suggest that in doing this you divide sheets of paper into three columns related to yourself, your family and your work role.
The next step is to work your way through your diary and look at the priorities you have been living to in your life.
These could include health, supporting kids, end-of-financial-year compliance with your co-workers or team. They could also reflect less positive items such as poor diet and self-care, neglect or isolation from family or friends, and working with one or more monsters in the office.
In any event, the idea is to summarise key themes in each column and write a ‘report’ related to how each of these makes you feel at this time. The outcome is worth discussing with a close friend or a trained leadershift guide.
Terry’s diary
I remember reviewing this exercise with Terry, who is a divorced fly-in fly-out mine manager in his mid 40s.
He wryly summarised his personal priorities as “EH Holden restoration, shiraz research and trying to avoid what my GP is saying about my blood pressure”.
He described his priority people, including teenage and 20s kids as “airport transport disputes and mobile phone-managed crises”. He described his professional priorities as “hand holding a team of old hands who are on the home straight to retirement”.
Given this self-report was a little tongue in cheek, it still spoke volumes about Terry’s personal effectiveness in the three areas of activity I employ.
I define personal effectiveness as awareness of your self, the situation in which you find yourself and the impact you have on others.
It is noteworthy that the concept of personal effectiveness can also be applied as a definition of leadership when it incorporates capacity to influence others.
Like many site-based people, Terry’s personal effectiveness was largely governed by his FIFO routine and his job.
He was semi aware of his health needs, was doing all he could afford on his mobile phone plan with his family and slogging doggedly on with his tired and grumpy team at the site.
When I asked Terry if he wanted to work at changing things for the better he laughed suspiciously: “You aren’t going to get me onto another course on time management are you Don? I did all that stuff 15 years ago”.
I explained to Terry that personal effectiveness is about life management rather than time management, with its associated slogans related to working smarter rather than harder. I am interested in people getting the best out of themselves rather than the most out of themselves.
This is the essence of a leadershift and it can be effected with a number of levers and jacks I have learned to bring to the process.
One lever I brought to Terry’s personal leadershift was related to a team approach to his wellbeing and, in particular, his blood pressure.
This is inevitably more effective than the individual doing it alone, given that most of the people I work with are very able leaders in the workplace sense. I encouraged Terry to track down a GP who would expect results related to diet and exercise each three months as opposed to increased prescriptions each 12 months.
Terry also got himself in front of a personal trainer who built a realistic regimen he could pursue on site. He talked a mate into getting involved as well and I agreed to keep an eye on his progress. The ‘team’ was in place.
A powerful catalyst to progress in the priority people domain is what I call the ‘rocking chair review’. The idea is to look back on your work life from a retired perspective and think about the impact you have had on the people who counted.
Terry observed that his record to date could be described as fees paid, food provided and appearances at sundry family get togethers, such as birthdays, Easter and Christmas. Terry had been increasingly unhappy about this but fairly resigned to it.
When we considered how things might be improved, Terry became a lot less sceptical about my perspective on leadership with its focus on the individual’s view as opposed the company’s
Personal effectiveness in the professional domain is, of course, the best catered area of the three in terms of content and providers. I believe that it can be further enhanced by examining aspects of admired role models and building these into your leadership style.
Wherever possible I like my clients to nominate Australians in this regard.
This is in partly because many European and North American professional role models have been sanitised and spin doctored by the time they land in our seminars and bookcases.
Another, more important, reason is related to the importance of recognising and building from our own fairest and best, with all their strengths and eccentricities, as opposed to following the so called gurus.
Terry nominated Fred Hollows as an inspiration for his direct honesty, his generosity and his intolerance of waffle. Terry could see a place for these qualities with the complacency and negativity that tended to exist in his work team.
Having explored Terry’s personal effectiveness with him across his three domains and identified a small but significant number of items on which he wanted to work, we set about creating a pathway and a timeframe around which he could build his leadershift.
In my next article I will explain the dynamics of this process so that you can employ it yourself.
• Don Clayton works as a corporate psychologist and leadership professional. He is the creator of the leadership program Leadershift.
