Practicing self-awareness and identifying your behaviour strengths will help you manage your behaviour choices and help you form effective collaborations. These are the key steps to becoming an effective and influential leader as you stop being merely a boss. Achieving the goal of effective leadership requires daily practice of managing yourself well within your behaviour strength domain. This requires the motivation to change and to acknowledge how your behaviour impacts others around you. You use your “behaviour smarts” to connect to why it is you choose to behave the way you do. In this awareness you can make a conscience choice to change aspects of your behaviour that are hindering your effectiveness as a leader.
We must recognize that leadership is not simply a buzzword, but an action – being an active participant in relationships with others in the organization. Change is rarely welcomed; it makes us uncomfortable because it forces us to make a conscience effort to do something different. Change forces us out of our comfort zones and long held standard practices and mental models. In effectively leading others we must acknowledge as Jim Collins said, that “good is the enemy of great.” We cannot create great organizations and become great leaders if we are unwilling to change those elements of our behaviour that we accept as good enough. In that thought, influential leadership becomes a full time, daily, and lifelong pursuit to performance excellence.
Influential leaders are committed not only to their success but to the success of others. They support and encourage others around them and do what they can to help them achieve their goals and succeed in the pursuit of fulfilling purpose. Self-awareness helps us understand how our behaviour impacts others, and identifies our behaviour strengths. In this process we discover why it is we behave the way we do. Knowing all of this we become empowered with a purpose and the motivation to change. Remember the words of Keyes, “that the hardest thing is not to get people to accept new ideas; it is to get them to forget the old ones.”
If you want to become an influential leader, stop being viewed by those around you as a “boss.” Achieving the performance outcomes you desire for your organization, you must change the elements of your behaviour that are inhibiting you from becoming an effective leader. … And what is the result if you do? You will create workplace culture where people will love to work. They will come to work inspired and motivated to solve problems and achieve results. They will cultivate relationships where everyone feels part of the team with a shared responsibility and accountability for the organization’s future and ultimately, their own personal success.
Catherine is the President and CEO of CORPORATE HARMONY, providing virtual solutions for leadership development and organizational culture change. Her leadership and coaching experience as a Project Manager in an ever-changing, fast moving technological organization with unrelenting demands drove her to the realization that a positive mindset and strength-building behaviors are essential for today’s complex and chaotic organizational systems. CORPORATE HARMONY’s virtual platform of programs, coaching and performance measurement, is an innovative online technology of tested proprietary content. The world-class content of CORPORATE HARMONY’s Positive Presence Program develops the skill of ‘Positive Presence’ and the necessary ‘Positive Presence Behaviour Competencies’ for maintaining a positive and energized mindset and increased performance in today’s complex work environment, and leading to a culture of collaboration and connection. Catherine’s vision for Corporate Harmony is to bring the skill of “Positive Presence” to the corporate world as it becomes more complex, ambiguous and chaotic. Catherine is uniquely positioned to impact organizations’ productivity and long term success, with her powerful vision of eliminating bad stress from every workplace around the globe, bringing purpose into the people equation to promote healthy, productive and meaningful work cultures and turn the tide on the neglect of mental health on a global scale. Catherine is author of the book: “CORPORATE HARMONY – The Performance Link for Today’s Modern Organization” Catherine can be reached at: Catherine.Osborne@corporateharmony.ca or go to ‘contact us’ on our website www.corporateharmony.ca. Catherine is available for consultation, and can be reached by 519-695-3407.