SUMMARY

Are you always in control with what you get done in a day, in a week? Do you find that the most challenging person to lead is yourself?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year, and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around leadership by talking about the first area of leadership and that is Personal Leadership.

So, the 21st century VUCA leader needs to start with the area of leadership called Personal Leadership, leading self. As I said, sometimes for me, I was the hardest person to lead. And I know that I got promoted into positions as I went through my military and my corporate career, and I thought, "Fantastic!" Had a big smile on my face and it looked good, but I was thinking, "You're kidding. I don't know how to lead myself. How am I supposed to lead other people?"

And it was then that I discovered that I needed to build a platform of my own leadership and then others would follow that. So, let me unpack what elements we work on in the area of Personal Leadership.

The first area is our identity.

The second area is the area of intelligence. IQ is not enough. Technical ability is not enough. We all need to work on our emotional intelligence, our social intelligence, and creative intelligence.

The third area is the area of intention.

So, the three areas of Personal Leadership that I work on in the program is our identity, our intelligences, and our intention. And we've done a lot of work on those things over the last few months. So, if you haven't listened to those, I suggest that you do go back, refresh, go through what it is that we were talking about in the areas of personal power in particular so that you understand what it is that you need to be able to lead self.

Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week, where we go into the next area where we need to make these shifts in our leadership, and we look at the area of Process Leadership. I'll see you then.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Are you always in control with what you get done in a day, in a week? Do you find that the most challenging person to lead is yourself?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year, and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around leadership by talking about the first area of leadership and that is Personal Leadership.

We started last week talking about how we need to make certain shifts in the way that we lead because we're leading in a different environment to what we were 10 years ago. We now work in a VUCA world. You've heard that term before. It's about volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It says things move really, really fast. We don't have all the answers and sometimes we've just got to make it happen with what we've got.

Leadership is not a set of skills for telling other people what to do. And unfortunately, I have experienced a change in mindset around what leadership is. I speak to people all the time and they think it's all about managing people. It's about getting people to do things. It's about achieving results by leading people. I want to challenge that again today by saying that leadership is a set of internal characteristics of the leader. 

There's a great principle that I've learned when I did my coach training many years ago and it's the Be-Do-Have model. It's not all about just getting things done. It's about who do I need to be so that I then do the things that I need to do to have the results that I want.

So, the 21st century VUCA leader needs to start with the area of leadership called Personal Leadership, leading self. As I said, sometimes for me, I was the hardest person to lead. And I know that I got promoted into positions as I went through my military and my corporate career, and I thought, "Fantastic!" Had a big smile on my face and it looked good, but I was thinking, "You're kidding. I don't know how to lead myself. How am I supposed to lead other people?"

And it was then that I discovered that I needed to build a platform of my own leadership and then others would follow that. So, let me unpack what elements we work on in the area of Personal Leadership.

The first area is our identity, and we've been doing a lot of work around that over the last few months. That personal power. Who do we think we are? What limiting or false beliefs that we may have? Our level of confidence and our ability to know that we have it within us and around us everything that we need to be able to get ahead in life. A lot of people say things like, "I'm not a leader. Leaders are born and I wasn't born a leader." And beliefs like that hold them back from being who they need to be to lead themselves, to lead process, and to lead people.

The second area is the area of intelligence. IQ is not enough. Technical ability is not enough. We all need to work on our emotional intelligence, our social intelligence, and creative intelligence. It's not just about the ability to do the job. We need to be able to interact with our self. We need to interact with others. So therefore, these skills that we've been talking about over the last few months are vitally important to lay the platform so that you can be who you need to be to lead in any situation. 

The third area is the area of intention. To be a great leader of self, we need to know how to set intention. We need to be purposeful and have plans put in place so that we know where we're going, whether that be for our career or our whole of life. 

So, the three areas of Personal Leadership that I work on in the program is our identity, our intelligences, and our intention. And we've done a lot of work on those things over the last few months. So, if you haven't listened to those, I suggest that you do go back, refresh, go through what it is that we were talking about in the areas of personal power in particular so that you understand what it is that you need to be able to lead self.

What are the key crucial competencies of this VUCA world for you to be able to lay that platform of self leadership? We need to make shifts in our mindset and in our behaviour the volatility, the uncertainty, the complexity, and the ambiguity of the marketplace that we're working in. So, let me just finish up today by unpacking the shifts that we need to make in those three areas of Personal Leadership. Let's start with identity. 

The shift that we need to make in identity is to shift from feeling like a fraud to being in flow with who we really are. It's all about authenticity. It's all about getting back to our true identity, rather than running that Performance Trap to get the approval of others. So, the first area we need tonight is in the area of our identity.

The second shift we need to make in our intelligences is to go from singular focus to a multifocus in our intelligences for us to be able to lead ourselves and then go on to lead process and lead others. There are many other skills that we need, and these are not the warm and fuzzies. These are not the, "They'd be nice to have, but they're not as important as the technical skills." 

In my experience, the word soft skills is used incorrectly because it's a lack of these competencies that create all the challenges. So therefore, these are the harder skills. These are the tangible skills that we need to be able to navigate this thing called self-leadership. So, the second area is to make a shift in our intelligences.

The third area that we made to make a shift in is in our intention. We need to shift from being scattered and just running by the seat of our pants and we'll just see what happens tomorrow to planned and purposeful so that nothing is a surprise. Now, I know that particularly in the environment we're in right now, things happen, things change. 

However, when we are a person that is well-planned and we anticipate change and we have contingencies in place, all we need to do is shift the goalposts, rather than throw the baby out with the bath water and going to overwhelm and get nothing done. So, the third area that we need to make our shifts in is the area of intention.

So, there you have Personal Leadership. It's all about our identity, our intelligences, and our intention. And it's vital for us to be able to get that area sorted out before we move into leading process, before we move into leading people.

So, if you're like I used to be and you think leadership is about getting people to do what you want them to do, consider a mindset shift to go, "No, no, leadership starts with me." Leadership starts with self and set some goals around where you can work on your Personal Leadership. 

Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week, where we go into the next area where we need to make these shifts in our leadership, and we look at the area of Process Leadership. I'll see you then.