“Everyone wanted to be like Jack(Welch of GE), but leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else.” The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else.
Your Leadership Emerges from Your Life Story.
We need a new kind of leader to lead our institutions in the 21st century – a leader who can empower and inspire others to lead.
Your True North represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point – your fixed point in a spinning world – that helps you stay on track as a leader. Your True North is based on your most cherished values, your passions and motivations, and the sources of satisfaction in your life.
These pressures and seductions may cause you to detour from your True North. When you get too far off course, your internal compass tells you something is wrong and you need to reorient yourself. It requires strength of character, courage, and resolve to resist these constant pressures and take corrective action when necessary.
Six principle areas required to lead yourself:
1) Gaining self-awareness
It may take a lifetime to gain complete awareness of yourself, but your self-knowledge can be accelerated by honest feedback from others.
2) Practicing your values and principles under pressure
The key to your values is not what you say you believe in, or even how you behave when things are going well. You really find out what your values are when you are under pressure or things are not going your way.
3) Balancing your extrinsic and intrinsic motivations
It is not surprising that leaders like promotions, bonuses and pay increases, and recognition from their peers and the media. But if these motivations dominate their passions, they are at risk of derailing, sooner or later. Authentic leaders recognize their intrinsic motivations like helping others, making a difference in the world, and building organizations with purpose and meaning. The important thing is not to deny your extrinsic motivations, but to balance them with intrinsic motivations.
4) Building your support team
An essential element of staying focused on your True North is to build a support team that can help you stay on track. Your team starts with having at least one person in your life with whom you can be completely open and honest.
Having a mentor who can give you straight feedback can be invaluable. It is good to have a support group of your peers with whom you can share openly and who will be there for you when you most need them.
The reality is you cannot wait to build your support team until you are facing difficulty. The time to do it is now, because long-term, deep relationships and shared life histories take decades to build.
5) Staying grounded by integrating your life
Every leader is facing the challenges of meeting all their commitments in life – their jobs, their families and their communities as well as preserving time for their personal life. The key is maintaining your integrity by being the same person in all these environments, and not letting your leadership commitments at work pull you away from the fullness of life.
6) Understanding your passions and purpose of your leadership
Once you understand the passions that emanate from your life story, you will discover the purpose of your leadership – in other words, your True North will become clear.
Developing yourself as these leaders have done is not an easy task. It is a marathon, not a sprint, to gain self-awareness, solidify your values, balance your motivations, build your support team, integrate your life, and understand the purpose of your leadership.
As President Theodore Roosevelt said in his famous 1908 address:
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows the triumph of high achievement and who if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
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