Effective Every-Day Leaders have an admirable list of qualities under their leadership belt. The final competency is about how you are able to self-assess how effective you are in driving results with your team. As you can guess, self-awareness is critical to enable you to check in on how effective you are with your team, peers and boss.
How Effective Am I Really?
You may say to yourself, “I’m meeting all my goals, so I must be effective!” Whoa…just meeting your goals, alone does not measure leader effectiveness. Last month the blog series covered the problem with being myopically focused on goals, which can lead to overlooking the needs of your people. The truth is, if your people are engaged and hitting all their goals you can certainly conclude you are indeed an effective Every-Day Leader. Take time for self-awareness and measure your effectiveness using some of these tips:
- Inspire action: Paint a vision of the future that inspires your people to do whatever it takes to get there.
- Be optimistic: Actively seek out the positive qualities in your people, helping them overcome their own feelings of self-doubt. In return, you’ll encourage optimism throughout your organization.
- Have integrity: Be honest, forthright consistent with your company’s core values. Your team will follow suit.
- Have confidence: Highly effective leaders know deep down they and their team can accomplish anything they set their minds to. Show confidence to your employees and they will respond in kind.
Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence
You may already be doing the steps above to develop self-awareness, which is great. Now it’s time to dig a little deeper. I talked about emotional intelligence at the beginning of the year. Let’s look at how this leadership competency enables you to evaluate your effectiveness as an Every-Day Leader:
- Self-Awareness You can see what an important topic this is! In order to effectively lead others you need to know yourself well. Take a look at your emotions throughout the day and understand how they affect you as a leader. A good first step is to notice the impact you have on your team members. Do they look engaged by the message you just delivered to them? If not, be curious and ask them what they are thinking. It’s also time to assess how you may have contributed to their response.
- Self-Regulation – When you are feeling emotional at work, are you able to control them? Can you figure out what pushed your hot button? If you have difficulty controlling your emotions, it’s helpful to give yourself time to cool off. Ideally, you want to be able to look at your audience at that moment in time, be in control of your emotions and elicit the response you want from them. Be the leader they want to follow.
- Motivation – As an Every-Day Leader, are you intrinsically motivated by your job? The best leaders are motivated by the work they do and it’s contagious with your team and others you work with! In addition, you’ll notice team members that don’t share that passion for their work. Be curious and have an empathetic discussion with them to find out where their motivations are greatest.
It’s a wrap…
Lastly, if you want to know what your team thinks of you and your effectiveness, ask them. Or better yet, have someone conduct a 360 review on you. This is a great assessment tool to find out how others perceive you as an Every-Day Leader. Once the data is gathered, you can determine the trends you want to work on to be more effective. I conduct these on many of the leaders I coach. Let me help you on your leadership journey. Above all, you’ll gain self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and be able to measure your own effectiveness. Reach out and we can get started!