Leadership Competencies to Up Your Game in 2021
2021 is YOUR year - consider these strategic competencies to up your game.
We’re back this week with a few more nuggets to round out Scaling Leadership. What are the key competencies for success and the biggest pitfalls?
The fine folks over at the Leadership Circle Profile break it into 5 Conscious Competencies and 3 Reactive Tendencies.
Let’s start with the 5 competencies: Relating, Self-Awareness, Authenticity, Systems Awareness, and Achieving.
These make sense, no? Pause for a second and re-read those five. Even without getting into the research and nitty gritty dimensions within each, your gut should be sounding a bell of resonance.
The most effective and scaled leaders develop and grow the capacity and capabilities of their team. A developed team is empowered, has strong decision making skills, is capable, and the leader is not a bottleneck and is positioned for strategic visioning and execution.
What’s people development without personal connections? (Relating)
What’s effective leadership without knowing the impact of your words and actions? (Self-Awareness)
How much trust can you have in a leader who isn’t vulnerable or authentic? (Authenticity)
What’s professional development and performance without business context? (Systems Awareness)
If you aren’t delivering results, how long do you remain a leader? (Achieving)
Gut check - which of these 5 are you nailing? What makes you successful in that area? What if you were 5% more effective? What would that look like?
Now let’s look on the flip side. Of the 5, which could use some love and focus? Name a hurdle that gets in your way of feeling effective in the identified area. Literally say it outloud.
Now that you’ve said it outloud, how much is fact and what is the narrative that contributes to holding you back? What needs to shift in that narrative to have an impact on your leadership effectiveness?
Alrighty...before we wrap things up, let’s take a quick look at the 3 Reactive Leadership Tendencies that can reduce your effectiveness and hinder your efforts to scale your impact.
Here they are: Complying, Protecting, and Controlling.
I’m going to pose a series of questions. Take note of your honest answers. Afterall, this is your development and no one but you is hearing the responses.
Do you identify with being a perfectionist?
Do you like things done a certain way?
Would you call yourself a people pleaser?
Are you afraid to rock the boat?
When you see potential conflict, do you distance yourself?
How often do you say, “I’ll just go ahead and do it, it’ll be faster than teaching someone else?”
Sit with your responses for a hot minute. There’s no right and wrong here. As with most things, there’s a spectrum. Of course having high standards can be a great thing. At what point does perfectionism tip the scale and begin to reduce your ability to scale and lead effectively?
I pose these to build curiosity and spark action. Perfectionism, distancing, defending, pleasing, and complying at certain levels all can impact your efforts to grow as a leader.
I’ve scratched the surface and mildly introduced you to conscious and reactive leadership habits. What will you do with this information? How will you grow? What does your development plan look like for 2021?
