For great leadership, learn to lead yourself first

We can’t do everything by ourselves.  Successful business leaders know that they need to use the skills, energy and efforts of others to create extraordinary organisations that deliver long term success.  Great teams, and even great organisations, require leaders that can lead themselves before they can lead others well.

Leading yourself

Leading others is more than just ‘managing' them. In fact, it requires you to provide so much more that simply managing people as resources. Great leadership is about creating environments for success and giving purpose to others, so that they fully and deeply engage with the business and what it seeks to achieve.

It is critical that leaders can lead themselves first.

People see what you do, rather than what hear you say. If you are not managing and leading yourself, then regardless of your ‘leadership talk', people will not see you as their leader.  It is ‘walking the talk’ that makes the difference. The saying, "People don't remember what you said, they rarely remember what you did, but they always remember how you made them feel" is so important to leaders. The way that you make people feel about the direction, the culture and the values of the business and what you do will define whether you are leading your people to high performance, or simply managing a human resource.

How do you lead yourself?

Leading yourself requires a few simple skills and thinking frameworks:

1. Self-awareness

   Without self-awareness – particularly of your emotional responses, your defensive behaviour patterns, and your values and drivers, you will simply be at the whim of these things as you are triggered in the workplace.  Being self-aware allows thoughtful intervention and use of these aspects of yourself as required to enhance a situation and move you forward.

2. Self-management

   Being able to manage yourself to present the best version of yourself for the specific circumstance is a key leadership skill.  From self-awareness comes the knowledge of self.  Self-management requires the skill of understanding circumstance and developing the skills to control and apply yourself in useful ways.

3. Purpose and vision

    
   Once you can manage yourself, it is critical to be clear of your personal purpose – your reason ‘why', which makes what the organisation and the particular activities you are engaged in relevant and meaningful to you.  This purpose, and the vision that this leads to, becomes the ‘reason why' you can lead others.  When others buy in to the bigger picture, and can align their personal ambitions and purpose to this, it creates true ‘leadership'.
   Only then can you begin the process of leading others.

So, do you lead for high performance, or simply manage human resources?