TM - August 2007 - (Page 37) resources, and people with that type of pure brain power don’t live on a bell curve. But there are leaders who love to learn. They are the ones who ask for coaches, who are constantly reading the latest business or leadership book, who are always brushing up their skills and who are able to truly listen to others. At present, such leaders are the exception and not the rule. Paging Dr. Phil aware enough to want to detect their own errors, learn from mistakes and self-correct them throughout their entire career. Increasingly, we will look at flexibility for its own sake as the key for leaders to be adaptive, as well as an end to static strategies that reflect the past. It’s important to recognize the need for self-awareness. That starts with making it an explicit organizational value. It needs to be reflected in the organization’s culture and also in hiring and selecting only those leaders who demonstrate humility (ego in check), as well as a strong willingness to seek knowledge about themselves, and who aren’t afraid to say they value self-awareness. Those qualities at least unlock the door for more development. Some people develop beyond more-primitive levels of self-awareness naturally. That natural process of adult development often is sparked by pain or the desire to make meaning at a more mature level than, for example, getting stuff and spending money. As life events change, they demand that we upgrade our operating system to deal with the new circumstances. The classic example is the people locked in achiever mode who suddenly are faced with a life-threatening diagnosis. Their soon-to-be-former operating system simply can’t compute the new situation, and all of a sudden, they start to think differently about what’s important, what’s unimportant and how their values truly apply to their lives. Organizations (even large ones) certainly can’t be asked to artificially stimulate or instigate this type of fundamental change among their top people. But they must be willing to value those willing to take on major self-development, not look at it as a pathology and be a very helpful partner in that process. Willing individuals are needed, as well, and they’re not as rare as you might think. Not surprisingly, leaders are beginning to talk about self-awareness as a value. Many think one-on-one work — coaching, mentoring or apprentice-based methods — is very powerful. These methods are particularly helpful if the mentor, coach or master of a certain area is trained to challenge others to develop themselves holistically rather than simply in a technical skill or competency related to leadership. Although large organizations are at square one in terms of being able to help leaders develop greater selfawareness, it’s a critical focus for the decade ahead. “The real challenge of leadership development is to develop the operating system that allows leaders to operate much more effectively, and even beyond that, to think in a way that is higher order,” Anderson said. “They can then respond to the complexities that we are already in the midst of — and that are only going to get more tumultuous.” David Peck is the president of Leadership Unleashed, an executive coaching and management consulting firm. He can be reached at editor@TalentMgt.com. Self-awareness might sound more like a talk show topic than a leadership development tool. Yet, experts in all areas of coaching, education and leadership development converge on this as the key to many problems leaders face. Few companies successfully integrate self-awareness into leadership training, said Bob Anderson, founder and developer of the Leadership Circle Profile. “Frankly, I don’t see anyone doing it well,” he said. “The future is going to require a level of leadership that might be unparalleled in terms of managing complexity and turbulence. We don’t have a clue what’s coming at us and what we’re going to have to do. The kind of consciousness that can grapple with this level of complexity — there’s only about 5 percent of leaders today who test out that way.” The other 95 percent are like thoroughbred racehorses, charging around the track at full tilt. They are not making it a priority to develop greater consciousness through techniques such as taking regular quiet selfreflection time, aggressively seeking to uncover what’s in their blind spots, questioning their fundamental beliefs and how they relate to their behaviors, regularly seeking feedback from mentors or trusted advisers and integrating career setbacks or failures in a way that makes their skills more flexible. These are the practices that lead to new ways of operating. They help people open their minds to different ways of solving problems, managing diversity and shifting priorities. Anderson refers to these practices and abilities collectively as having a different operating system. Just as traditional, competency-based leadership skills are like tools, the self-awareness model takes into account a leader’s ability to use and redesign those tools dynamically, adapting to change and managing complexity simultaneously. “When leadership goes extraordinary, it’s able to handle far greater complexity with much greater ease and fluidity,” Anderson said. “It’s not just that they have a competency they can run — they have an operating system that fluidly uses that competency when it’s needed in the situation and uses something else when something different is needed.” Traditionally, leaders rise to a certain level because of the way they’ve done things, and then they tend to stick with them. In that way, their proven methods become less flexible as time goes on. In contrast, current and future leaders must be self- talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com 37 August 2007 http://www.TalentMgt.com
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