powerful and impactful. That is what this book will show you how to do – unleash your Inner Leader.
In Chapter 2, you will meet Alexandra. As you absorb her story, look for parallels from her experience to apply to yourself. Make the commitment to know yourself, understand your strengths and weaknesses completely, and find clarity about yourself and the value that you have to offer. Peeling back these layers will reveal for you that when you truly know yourself and you have unmistakable clarity on who you are and what your value is, then you become a highly effective business professional, and your Inner Leader will be unleashed.
You and Your Inner Leader Chapter Summary
● This book is the culmination of the real-life experiences that my clients have faced: They have unleashed their Inner Leader to live their legacies and develop into world-class leaders.
● Part One is dedicated to getting to know yourself, because only when you know yourself can you begin to lead others and help others make their own impact.
● Part Two is dedicated to the major topics that my clients have requested coaching on: improving productivity, delegation, mentorship, personal language, networking, interviewing, and living your Leadership Legacy.
● Part Three is inspirational stories about guiding principles, letting go of me to get to us, reflecting on the past to get to the future, and when you become the inspiration.
● When you read this book, completing the exercises is essential. Whether you read it all the way through and then go back to do the exercises or do them as you read, I encourage you to actively participate in the exercises.
● Change is hard. To let your Inner Leader show through, you must be ready to make some changes to your behaviors, your actions, and potentially your beliefs.
● The Change Model consists of four steps: Awareness, Acceptance, Choice, and Change.
● After coaching more than 4,000 business professionals in 17 countries, the resulting concept is always similar: Everyone has a leader within them, and with some help, everyone can unleash their Inner Leader to become powerful and impactful.
Part One
Know Yourself…Authentically
Self-discovery is the key to unleashing your Inner Leader to the world. As shown in Figure 2.1, the first part of unleashing your Inner Leader is to know yourself…authentically. It is amazing that in all of the thousands of business professionals whom I have coached, they do not have clear answers to simple questions, such as:
● What are your top strengths?
● What do you value most?
● What is the most important impact that you make to your organization?
● What is your unique promise of value?
You can expect to discover the answers to these questions in Part One. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of completing the exercises in this part; they will give you the answers to catapult you to higher performance in Part Two. You can do them in any order, and the point is to do them all.
Go ahead; take the plunge into the pool of self-discovery. You will be one of the few leaders who really know themselves and then will be ready to unleash your leadership to the world!
Chapter 2
Strengths: Who Are You?
Successful leaders are adept at identifying and leveraging their strengths and those of their team. A strength is both what you love to do and what you are good at (your interests and your abilities). If you use your strengths in your job, you will gain clarity and get much more return on investment (ROI) on your personal energy. The secret to leadership transparency and authenticity is to find your three strengths and tell people about your strengths at least once a day; in six months others will use your words to describe you. A strength taken too far can be a weakness. You can leverage your strengths in career and professional development, succession planning, performance reviews, prioritizing work and time, and subtle promotion of self and group. Telling others your strengths is the first step to leadership transparency and authenticity; it allows your Inner Leader to emerge.
CaseStudy
Meet Alexandra, a senior manager in the pharmaceutical industry. Alexandra is an introverted, empathetic genetic counselor who has worked very hard to get to the senior level. Her boss wanted to promote her to a director with 130 direct reports, but he refused to pay her the same compensation as her male predecessor. Because of her gentle nature, it was hard for her to ask for equal pay for an equal job done. That was before her leadership coaching.
Alexandra's story might seem, at first blush, like a simple case of convincing a manger or organization to offer fair pay for a certain level of responsibility. For Alexandra it was much more than that. She knew that she was a good leader and that her team thought so, but there were many times when her environment demanded that she be something that she was not – as she put it, “tough.” I suggested that she begin an inward journey to fully discover what made her tick. In essence, she set out to discover her natural strengths. This chapter will help you do the same.
This chapter is dedicated to helping you build the life that you really want by asking you the questions: Does your life reflect who you are, and are you happy? The answer to these questions lies in understanding and knowing yourself; therefore, to build the life that you really want, you should consider:
● Discovering your natural strengths
● Leveraging your natural strengths
● Being confident enough in your authenticity (natural strengths) to let it drive your actions and behavior, even when you get stuck, want to quit, are stressed, or are figuring out what it is that you really want
We all have an inkling as to what makes us tick in general terms, for example: I am collaborative, not competitive; I am deliberative, not impulsive; I believe in action, not analysis; and I lead from the front. What I am asking here is for you to take the deep dive and go way below the surface to understand your innate strengths.
What Is a Strength?
Your strengths are your who and your results are your what. Everyone produces results. The differentiating factor is the impact of your results and who you are when you produce these results. The question becomes, Who are you when you are driving results? Asked a different way, how do you drive results? Imagine that I am looking for a new leader for a special project in my organization. Whether the hire is internal, external, or from my team whom I know very well, if I am looking for one type of leader, and I hire another type of leader, it will not be a good match for either side. As an example, if I am looking for the leader who drives results through building relationships with his or her team, but I hire the leader who drives results by sitting in an office analyzing data and asking his or her team to produce pounds of reports, neither the newly hired employee nor I will be happy. To use our strengths authentically, it is incumbent upon us to know ourselves intimately and show our strengths to the world.
When I was still working in the corporate world, trying to build the life that I really wanted, one of the important lessons that I learned from my coach, which I enthusiastically pass on in my coaching practice, is identify your strengths – what you are good at and what you love to do. Then actively seek out environments in which you can use those strengths that make you the happiest.
The diagram (Figure 2.1) that I use to demonstrate this shows your interests plus your abilities equals your strength.
Figure 2.1 The Strength Formula
Whenever I present this concept, I like to say that the whole game of being happy in your work is to figure out what you are good at and what you love to do, and find someone to pay you to do it.
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