Laying a Robust Foundation for your 2020 Leadership Excellence

It is that time of the year…when an energetic leader makes several promises to himself, and makes resolutions.

These goals set out for the year ahead find loads of inspiration from things that did not turn out as expected in the past year, and stemmed through aspirations of excellence ahead. However, as you, being one of those thoughtful leaders, get down to preparing your goals, it is imperative you source them through expectations set out for future-ready and new age leaders in the present business landscape. So, here are some of the essential building blocks for a future-proof and excellence-laden new year resolution list. Also, learn and understand why it matters for you this year, before you dive into action:

1. Delving into Self-Awareness

This is about knowing and accepting your greatest strengths, areas of improvement, and default behavioural tendencies. Self-awareness is the foundation stone and the key driver in the journey of leadership excellence. Unless you identify and measure how far or deviated are you from the zenith of excellence, you’d continue to face unforeseen and unexplained challenges, and keep sailing in the dark. This is a common mistake many leaders are likely to make. Despite a sincere intent and expectation for self-improvement, they miss out on either identifying the areas of improvement as deeply as is needed, or refrain from admitting that they lack certain capabilities. This is where the entire purpose may get defeated. This causes a huge Leadership gap.

Self-awareness simply starts with knowing who you are at the core—discovering your authentic self. It calls for you to be courageous enough to walk the path of your authenticity by accepting the areas that need to be worked upon. Once you truly get to know yourself, you will realize what behaviour is hindering your performance. Self-awareness is a discovery, and it must be followed by an ardent practice.

Practicing self-awareness helps you to enhance EQ. You cannot empathise with others until you know yourself well. Once you are aware of your behaviours and emotions that trigger those behaviours, you discover what needs to be changed, and that is how you improve your ability to understand others’ situation by placing yourself in their shoes.

2. Actioning Self-Management

This is the succeeding step of the way where your self-awareness becomes the driver, and you drive into an action. Once you identify your areas of improvement, which could be communication – such as lacking assertiveness or active listening; or impulse control, you begin to explore how you can regulate your behaviour. You learn to be more mindful and hence, regulate your performance and deliver better in every situation. This is where you begin not to avoid difficult conversations because now, you do not fear conflicts that arise out of your undue silence or volatile impulse.

This mindfulness would also help you ensure you make your best efforts to turn all conflicts into productive ones – to leverage them towards eliciting effective solutions for the teams and hence, entire organization.

In a real-time situation, self-regulation can also be reflected through your tendency to ask questions with curiosity. Start with asking yourself “how actively am I listening or, introspecting after a conflicting situation—did I listen actively”. The introspections may also entail looking back at your expressions and seeking to make them more comprehendible before blaming others for not following what you asked for.

More so, self-regulation entails a mindfulness around resolving conflicts and practicing mental resilience. Rather than avoiding conflicts, which is a default human tendency, you jump into the action as soon as you sense it happening around you. Identify your role in the conflict – how you can leverage your influence and authority to resolve the conflict.

Similarly, resilience is about preparing yourself against a crisis by training your brain to respond wisely and actively in the hardest of situations. Instead of bombarding or erupting, you mindfully accept the crisis and turn to solution-oriented response. Learn more here.

3. Recognizing Derailment

Derailment or losing sight of the actual path of excellence doesn’t happen overnight. Since it takes place slowly owing to influences inflicting through a variety of situations and experiences, many leaders fail to recognize them until they go off-track completely. Derailments are sourced through a variety of factors. However, they mostly reflect in the form of lost impulse and unproductive conflicts, resulting into downfalls in performance and relationships.

With self-awareness and better self-management, you can control your impulse and you can be more adaptable. This will potentially help you to not just recognize the derailment but also avert it powerfully. Learn How.

Summing Up

A prolific behavioural change cannot occur without a deep self-awareness. Leaders who chose to bring a real change and improvement in their leadership proliferation, start by holding up mirrors to their existing behaviours and identifying areas of improvement, and then, they action the solutions that lead towards an unmatched excellence. Are you ready to walk that path of a true transformation this year? If you do, here’s what you need to get started.