The Greater You Are At Leading Yourself The Better You Will Be At Leading Others

We often ask ourselves what should I change in my mentality or behavior to be able to better understand others and improve my leadership style. Self-leadership is the practice of discovering and understanding who we are, what we do, and why we do things to identify our desired experiences and guide ourselves toward them. Marieta du Plessis, Professor in Psychology at the University of the Western Cape, emphasized the importance of value-based self-inspiration, self-goal setting, and to what extent we can apply our know-how in those terms to influence our own behaviors and improve our self-leadership. The term “Self-leadership” was first defined in 1983 by Carles Manz Nirenberg Chaired Professor of Business Leadership at the University of Massachusetts, as “a comprehensive self-influence perspective that concerns leading oneself”. In the words of Peter Drucker, being a Self-leader is to serve as chief, captain, or CEO of one’s own life. In other words, we must constantly identify, test, and apply things that enable us to thrive, succeed, and help others succeed in an ever-changing and ambiguous world.

When you think of how self-leadership can help you succeed and bring success to your organization, one way could be through being the best version of yourself in getting hired as well as being able to recruit and hire the best talents who will lead the organization for success. Warren Buffett, American business magnate and philanthropist, emphasizes one trait for hiring his people: Integrity. Integrity goes around being honest, kind, generous, having strong morals, and giving credit to other people. A person who lacks integrity is selfish, dishonest, and lazy. The way he puts it to demonstrate that qualities related to integrity can be developed and should be developed early in life: “The chain of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken”. Two other qualities he finds important in a new hire are Intelligence and Energy. However, it is Integrity that he finds the most important among the three of them. Because if someone is intelligent and Energetic but lacks integrity, he will not be true to himself and will make others feel insecure around him.

Patrick Lencioni, best known for authoring books on business management, particularly in relation to team management, like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Ideal Team Player, as well as tons of content that explores work team dynamics and offers solutions to help teams perform better, values the Hungryness, Humbleness, and Smartness as the three traits of an ideal team player. From his perspective, all three traits must exist simultaneously otherwise if only one is missing undesirable consequences will appear. An Accidental mess-maker can appear as a consequence of a person who is humble and hungry but lacks smartness. He is someone eager to engage respectfully but always messes things up. A Lovable Slacker according to Lencioni, would be a humble and smart person who lacks hungriness. He is a lovable good person who rarely goes above and beyond and you find yourself always pushing him and reminding him of accomplishing basic tasks. The most difficult type of team player is the Skilful Politician who is hungry and smart but lacks humbleness. He is so smart that he knows how to portray himself as being humble. When a person is good at presenting himself but lacks humility deep inside, he could be a danger to the team.

Buffett’s traits for hiring and Lencioni’s qualities for becoming an Ideal Team Player can be a starting point. There will be a lot of room for improvement when someone wants to become greater at leading oneself to become good at leading others.