Returning to Personal Context, for all of us, a key issue is our level if self-awareness. It is difficult to be objective about the world around us, if we don't have objectivity about ourselves. Sadly, we all wear psychologically-tinted glasses, but there is nothing fashionable about these shades!

If you want to be a good leader (or follower, for that matter), enhancing self-knowledge is important. In selecting your leadership actions, it is important to serve the interests of your team and organisation - not just fall back into default patterns and stay within your comfort zone. This makes life pleasant for you but may not benefit anyone else.

TODAY'S DEMANDS

The first thing to remember is that your leadership role at work is only part of your daily life - and, not sealed off from the rest.

Probably at the core of your daily existence is your role as a member of one or more families. We all face commitments and often unscheduled pressures since we are someone's parent, child, spouse or partner. An illness or death may throw our life into turmoil. The sale of a house or a separation may up-end our patterns.

Beyond the family, we have personal and social roles, which are also important: as friends and members of social, religious and other groups, which may involve us in voluntary work and other commitments.

We have professional associations that help define who we are; and, we may feel committed to support their standards - ahead of competing calls.

We have sporting, artistic and other hobbies - with attendant pleasure but also setbacks. Some leaders are particularly unpleasant to be around when their favourite football team has lost.

We are impacted by events in our local and national communities and also by events beyond. A terrorism attack half a world away may upset someone if they have relatives or friends in the vicinity.

As though these day-to-day pressures aren't enough, each of us also has a history that drives how we see and hear the world, how we feel - and respond.

YESTERDAY'S IMPRINTS

My domestic upbringing and the leadership models I observed colour how I think about such issues still today. My academic training added additional perspective - in some cases advantageous but no doubt also limiting due to the technical and left-brain emphasis of my studies. My career - and the people I have worked for - have given me additional good and bad models of leadership action.

As thinking beings, we watch and learn - and most particularly from the success or failure of our own actions. However, this learning is often narrow and naive. If a leadership initiative worked previously, we tend to assume it will again - even though the situation is different. We remember the action and the outcome but lose the context.

These historic influences and experiences create a jumble of themes plus lots of unresolved noise inside our heads: a mix of internalised values, bits of self-awareness (or lack of it!) and assumptions about people and their behaviour. These may block out current facts and desensitise us to the needs of people we are working with and their reactions to what we say or do.

So, when we choose a leadership action it is a compromise between objective and subjective demands: the situation as it actually is and what we see, hear and feel through the filters born of our experience. Changing metaphor: when a potter produces a vase, he or she focuses on developing a particular shape. But look closely and you may see the unintended marks of finger tips - and even full finger-prints. Our leadership actions are similarly rough-finished. They may have an intended shape, responding to the situation, but they also carry the imprint of our psychological biases and world view.

BLINKERS AND BLIND SPOTS

What does this all mean in the context of V|E|C|T|O|R? In selecting leadership actions, be self-aware. In choosing from the Illustrative Actions or crafting your own ideas, respond to external reality - in particular, the views and input of your colleagues and followers. Don't discount your experience and assumptions but check that they are relevant. Otherwise, your chosen actions may say more about your biases than they do about the situation and the needs of your people.

For example, if I am good at talking, I may talk when I should be listening; thereby turning people off. If I like thinking about the future and new strategic possibilities, I may focus on actions in Vision, when my team needs me to help them on technical and people problems with actions more attuned to Task and Organisation.

In sum, there are two problems of perception here: first, lacking objectivity in how we see and hear the world - and hence choosing inappropriate actions; second, compounding the first through insensitivity to the impact of these actions.

One reason we cling to our blinkers and blind spots is because what is needed (and we should be doing) often takes us out of our comfort zone. So, try to be objective - and push beyond your conventional response. Seek assistance if necessary from members of your team, from your boss - or anyone, who you think can help.

In this context, it is worth noting that Renewal is not an after-thought to the framework. It is as important as the others - and increasingly so. We live in a world of accelerating change. Both organisations and leaders have a continuing need for Learning and Reinventing. Everyone today is in a double bind: trying to unlearn redundant lessons from the past; and, simultaneously learning new skills and attitudes to deal with the forward rush of markets, expectations and technology.

SEEDS OF FAILURE

We all have our own particular weaknesses - but reassuringly (though not helpfully), some are shared quite widely. Recent research suggests that the wiring of the human brain predisposes us to over-optimism, favouring the status quo and sticking with the herd. Hardly good attributes for a leader.

But it gets worse: each Follower Question carries quite personal risks: temptations to let our own interests crowd out or undermine organisational objectives. Ambition or pride may seduce us into selecting goals, which benefit us rather than the company or team. A large and over-priced takeover may satisfy my desire for greater power but not fit strategically or lift the company's earnings per share. Assuming wider responsibility may raise my prestige but short-change my team.

Some of these personal risks are explained in greater depth in the individual Follower Question modules. They are also explored in the ["Seeds of Failure"] module.

As an aside, some of the "big names" used to illustrate archetypal aspects of leadership in other modules could equally be used to illustrate Seeds of Failure such as self-deception, ego-inflation or even rank dishonesty. However, these well-known people are presented to illustrate concepts not to justify their record or suggest that heroic leaders are better than others. In fact, as you will see when developing your Leadership Action Plan, the illustrative mini-cases you're offered each record a real-life experience of a line executive I've worked with - facing some all-too-familiar challenge of daily leadership action.

Dr. Timothy Pascoe AM
PhD (Cambridge), MBA (Harvard), BE & BEc (Adelaide)
Creator, V|E|C|T|O|R Leadership^®

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