The Nature of Leadership and Career

read time 5 minutes

Welcome to 20 new subscribers!

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

• Community Announcement

  - Join the FREE Thriving Through Career Transitions - Women’s Community

• Illustration of the week

  - The Swoop and Poop leader

• The Nature of Leadership

  - Recap of the 3 leaders that shape our leadership

  - 3 Steps to using your best, worst, and incomplete leaders to your advantage

📢Community Announcement

I am launching a FREE community - Thriving through career transitions for Women** In Technology.

This is a supportive space where you can:

• find solace, guidance

• boost your confidence

• continuously expand your knowledge

• connect and a network of like-minded ladies / non-binaries who share similar experiences.

📅 July 12 will be our first roundtable.

Find out more and join here.

*Non-binary individuals are also welcome. If you are from a different sector and are interested in joining, feel free to send me a message.

Illustration of the Week

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The Nature of Leadership + Career

Quick Recap

In Part 1 we discussed “Leadership Imprinting” from the best, worst, and incomplete leaders we have been exposed to in our careers.

This exposure often plays a bigger part in our leadership development than formal learning and education.

Have a quick read here.

As promised this week we will go through 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.

3 Steps to use your best, worst, and incomplete leaders to your advantage

Are you up for the challenge understand how leaders you’ve worked with have impacted your leadership?

✏Grab a pen and paper / digital device and work along with me.

🐹 I’ll use myself as a guinea pig.

Let’s go:

Step One: List as many attributes of the worst, best, and missing leaders in your career to date.

🐹 My example (To reduce newsletter length I have kept it to 7):

💩 WORST LEADERS

• Gaslight team members to maintain power and control

• Take credit for their teams work without acknowledging their team

• Micro-manage because they can’t trust, and need control, or the spotlight

• Are absent leader and then come into swoop and poop on your work

• Scattered and have no sense of vision or direction, and struggle to motivate the team

• Let their insecurities play out by bullying or blocking team member growth

• Focus on achieving team and organizational results to the detriment of their own health.

🔥 BEST LEADERS

• Know when to break bureaucratic rules

• Balance focus on team health + team performance / results

• Great at empowering the team with confidence and capabilities

• Know when to lead from behind and when to lead from in front

• Continually “ups their game” in knowledge and execution. Strives to rapidly learn and unlearn.

• Know when to give advice and when to coach to help you find your own answers

• Seek to help their team excel and don’t feel threatened by team members’ growth.

⭕ MISSING / INCOMPLETE LEADERS

Remember these are the leaders you wish you had at different time points. Often at the toughest, or most unguided periods of your career.

 🐹 My example:

• Make regular time to truly focus on life outside of work

• Champion DEI more loudly even if is not popular or accepted in that work culture

• Able to coach their teams to have health conflict / debate to evoke richer outcomes

• Invest time in money in the development of new team capabilities and services

• Take a hit to the financial bottom line in order to internalize environmental and social externalities i.e. degrowth in the Profit and Loss statement for the good of society and the environment.

✏ You turn – takes 5 minutes

It’s quite cathartic. I promise.

Step 2 – Figure out the imprints: leadership traits you’ve actively or passively copied

This is the more challenging part.

Now that you have your 3 buckets its time to ask yourself:

a)  Which “imprints” i.e. behaviours and attributes have I picked up from my best and worst leaders?

b)  How have I over-compensated? i.e. swung too far toward an attribute to be like my best leader or swung too far away from an attribute to avoid being like my worst leader?

c)  How have I or can I incorporate attributes of the missing leader into my own leadership?

d)  What are my “calls to courage” to change my imprints from the best, worst, or missing leaders that I have had?

List at least your top 5 imprints to amplify or adapt.

✏ You turn – take 5 - 10 minutes

Step 3: Choose ONE area to improve

🎯Focus on just one action that you can either amplify from the best or missing leader calls to courage.

Or

🎯Course correct one of your imprints or over-compensations from your worst leader.

⚠The temptation will be to focus on multiple areas. Get momentum on one. Then move to the next.

✏ You turn – takes 5 minutes

Take the challenge and let me know how you go!

Catch up on recent issues of The Nature of Leadership + Career

• Amplify or Unravel? The 3 types of leaders shaping your leadership

• How your scarcity mindset impacts your decision making and empathy + 3 ways to override it

• 3 career X-factors that most generalists ignore

Let’s continue to conversation

• Send feedback on:

  • this issue or any questions you have on leader

  • any questions you have on leadership, or career

  • future topics you would like explored in the newsletter.

• Career + Leadership Coaching - contact me if you would like to explore leadership or career coaching for you, or your team.

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