Hello KSKOers
⭐️Today is Christmas Eve, which is also my birthday. So, I’d like to share a little gift with you – a free copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway: Charting Your Leadership Journey ebook. Get your copy now! Thank you in advance for leaving a rate and review! ⭐️
For those who celebrate, I wish you a very merry Christmas, full of love and good cheer. I wish you rest and time to reflect on the last year. I hope you get the chance to look back at all of the things you’ve experiences, achieved, learned and overcome.
This year, lots of people have asked me about my journey to self-aware leadership. Here’s a little insight in to what it means to me – and what it means to you.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey in 2025!
Start Here
Many years ago, I worked with some unpleasant people. If you weren’t in their club you were out in the cold and boy, was that made clear. I often used to ask myself, in between my tears, ‘do these people have any idea of the impact they’re have on others??’. Sometimes impact would be exchanged for ‘damage’, ‘pain’ and ‘hurt’, but they were all variations on a similar theme.
“Do they have any idea of the impact they have on others?”
I left the organisation as soon as I could. Soon wasn’t soon enough though, and I had to tolerate it for nearly three years before I was able to find a different job.
The organisation I moved on to was on a different planet – psychologically speaking. Your class didn’t matter, your professional status didn’t matter. Your fit in the clique? Well, no one cared! What mattered was your passion for the community, your service to your customers and your care for your staff. The impact people had on each other was a far cry from what I’d experienced before. I saw, heard and felt a very new kind of leadership.
People without any line management responsibility or the word leader in their job titles ‘lead’. Servant leaders were everywhere, at all levels. The people who cared for others rose up and represented them. They spoke up on their behalf and stood up for the little guy. It was a chalk and cheese situation.
Two Lanes, Same Superhighway
These two situations kept replaying over and over in my mind. For an age, I didn’t know why. I spent a long time trying to work out the connections and eventually the fog cleared. Even though the situations were at two different ends of the work-culture spectrum, there were commonalities. The two situations were the yin and the yang of work life. They were the ‘this is what you do’ and the ‘this is what you don’t do’ of work experience that helped me shape and define excellent leadership.
The common themes between the two situations were:
- Behaviour, impact and awareness
- Leadership and relationships
- Hierarchy and culture
And so began my journey on the superhighway to discover more about self-awareness, leader effectiveness and leadership at all levels.
What is Self-Aware Leadership?
So, what is self-aware leadership? Over time, the definition has morphed from being a wordy academic descriptor to something far more useful to you in your workplace. Now it’s three clear layers….
Keep reading…