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#06 - Amplify or Unravel? The 3 types of leaders shaping your leadership
Ness Monsequeira
June 24, 2023
The Nature of Leadership and Career
read time 5 minutes
The Nature of Leadership and Career, a weekly newsletter where I provide 1 illustration and ~3 ideas to help you connect to your career, leadership, or work journey in a more natural way.
Today at a glance
Illustration of the week
3 Types of Leaders Shaping Your Leadership
The Nature of the Mind
Imprinting and its impact on your leadership
The Nature of Leadership
70:20:10 Model of learning
3 Types of Leaders Shaping your Leadership
Illustration of the Week
What are your key go-to resources to develop yourself as a leader?
Books, videos, leadership training, mentoring?
All valid ways to learn.
Yet based on the 70:20:10 model of learning, if 20% of your learning and knowledge comes from exposure ….
how often are you looking to the leaders you are or have been “exposed to” as a KEY source of your leadership development?
Understanding the concept of imprinting can better help us understand “exposure”.
The Nature of the Mind
What’s imprinting?
The quickest way to understand imprinting is by thinking of baby ducklings:
Image Credit: Vivek Kumar on Unsplash
As soon as baby ducklings hatch, they start following their mother.
How do they know how to do this?
Through the process of “marking” their mother and copying her.
Imprinting is the process of making an “imprint” (marking) of something or someone.
It is thought to be associated with learning during specific life phases.
The psychology of imprinting:
Early practical experience in life that determines the social imprints, attitudes, and behavior of biological organisms in their latter parts of life.
What an organism sees, experiences, and undergoes in the early chapters of its life is bound to create a magnanimous effect on its behavioral psychology, life choices, and instincts later in life.
If you’re keen to learn more about imprinting, I got my source reference from this great site.
The Nature of Leadership + Career
Great, but how does imprinting relate to my leadership and career exposure?
The concept and process of imprinting have been extended to career and leadership by people like Harvard Business School Professor, Monica Higgins.
She looks at Career Imprinting - the process by which individuals pick up or cultivate a certain set of capabilities, connections, confidence, and cognition due to their work experiences at a particular employer.
Higgins talks about how career and culture impact a leaders’ behaviors, especially decision making.
Whilst there needs to be more research done into it, I believe the same is true about
Leadership Imprinting i.e. how exposure to a certain set of “capabilities, connections, confidence, and cognition due to your work experiences working with particular leaders”.
So, the question then becomes which leaders have left the biggest imprints on you?
3 Types of leaders that shape your leadership
All the leaders you have worked with in your career can be bundled into 3 simple categories*.
The Worst leaders you’ve worked with
Are the leaders who show you who you don’t want to be like.
They often hold the personas of insecure narcissists, and authoritarian leaders.
If you have been exposed to these types of leaders, this is the category you need to spend the most time reflecting on
🧠Was their behaviour about them, or you? Which of their undesirable attributes might have rubbed off / imprinted on you? How might you have overcompensated not to be like them?
The Best leaders you’ve worked with
Are the leaders whom role model attributes that make you think “I wish I could do ‘X’, or could lead like ‘Y’).
The are often characterized as visionaries or the leaders that people want to follow.
Sadly, not everyone has been fortunate to be exposed to truly awesome leaders.
🧠If you have, reflect on the why, what, and how of their leadership attributes. This will help you further embed parts of their leadership style into your own.
🧠If you haven’t, understanding what you desire from your version of the ‘best’ leader will help you in your next career choice.
The Missing leaders
Are the leaders you wish you had at different time points. Often at the toughest, or most unguided periods of your career.
One of the best articles you can read on leadership is “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader”.
The key premise is that no one leader can be all things to all people. Leaders need to understand their strengths and weaknesses and fill in their necessary gaps.
🧠 It’s wise for you to figure out what have been the missing leadership attributes you’ve needed and how you want to cultivate them into your unique style.
*I have purposely given the categories ‘bland labels’ best and worse because imprints are left from the leaders across the spectrum from the most toxic to the most visionary.
How do I make these insights practical?
In next weeks newsletter I will provide a simple and practical 3-step process to help you:
amplify the attributes of your best leaders and missing leaders, and;
ensure you don’t unravel due to imprints from your worst leaders.
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