The Leadership Map
Where do you begin your journey to better leadership? The breadth of your “leadership landscape,” that is, the range of ways you might choose to lead, is defined by the overlap of three areas: your leadership mind-set, your style, and your skills, all of which are strongly affected by context, or environment. Without even noticing it, you have already narrowed your leadership choices. The Leadership Map provides one way to think about how you can improve your leadership by expanding the range of behaviors you might choose.
Select elements of the map to learn more.
MIND-SET
- Viewpoints
- Beliefs
- Competencies
- Abilities
- Who you are
- What you bring
- Habits of behavior
LEARNING LOOP = Increase awareness, find new ways to think, try new behaviors
- Measures
- Impact
Tips for Getting Feedback
One of the most powerful ways to expand your effectiveness is to get the kind of feedback that can help you assess your success. To get feedback that can help you grow, follow these steps:
- Be curious about how others interpret your actions.
- Train yourself to ask for feedback from others. When they give it to you, ask them enough questions to make sure you understand what behavior led to their feedback. Stay curious and avoid slipping into defensiveness.
- Say “thank you” and listen. Above all, don’t explain your behavior or try to correct the giver’s “misinterpretation.” This is a case where perception actually is reality. Be grateful that the person trusts you enough, and cares about you enough, to tell you the truth as he or she sees it.
- Ask what you might have done differently that would have worked better. Reflect on what you’ve heard. Look for how you could have done better and determine what to try next time.
Use the patterns of feedback you receive and adapt your behavior accordingly. And keep asking for more feedback.
Context
Your environment plays a part in determining the choices you can make. As a leader, you influence what is considered acceptable behavior in the workplace or in specific situations.
Effective leadership behaviors must be appropriate to the leader’s context. The most effective leaders adapt their behaviors to their situation as appropriate.
How can you test the contextual limits you perceive in your organization? Here are four techniques you can try:
- Inquire about where the limits came from.
- Explore whether they still serve a useful purpose.
- Test (prudently) where the boundaries are with small behavioral experiments.
- Practice confidently explaining the new approach you would like to try and how it will improve the results you can accomplish.
Leadership mind-set
This includes the viewpoints and beliefs that frame how you think about leadership. Mind-sets, or mental models, shape your ideas about how leaders should act.
We all have beliefs about leadership, even if we are unaware of them, and they influence what we see. One common belief is that leadership is primarily an up–down relationship but generally flows downward in a hierarchy. The view that leadership moves up, down, and sideways represents a different mind-set. When you first encountered that viewpoint, did it shift your perspective? If so, you expanded your leadership mind-set circle.
Skills
This area is probably the most familiar to both leaders and leadership development experts. It includes the kinds of behaviors you might practice in a class on setting goals or giving feedback. This is often the first area we look at when someone’s leadership seems ineffective.
While building skills and competencies is certainly important for leaders, focusing on expanding skills and competencies alone does not result in enduring behavior change. Such change occurs faster and lasts longer when beliefs about leadership are expanded first.
Style
Leadership style springs from at least three elements: who you are (your personality, values, and character), what you’ve learned through your experiences (your development), and your habitual behavior patterns. Your personality type—the core of who you are—doesn’t change over time, although it may seem like it does as you develop throughout your lifetime. This definition of style includes how you express your personality type and incorporates a wide range of influences from your family, your cultural heritage, and other defining circumstances unique to your life.
A leader’s style includes behaviors that reflect personal characteristics or values unrelated to personality type as well. Such things as courage, willingness to learn, comfort with power, and decisiveness all play a role in leadership effectiveness. People of all types can possess these qualities, although they may appear through different behaviors.
Leadership behaviors
As a leader, the only thing you truly control is your own behavior. This arrow represents the set of behaviors you can choose from in a given situation. The arrow is as wide as the overlapping areas of the circles representing leadership mind-set, style, and skills. The more overlap there is, the greater the range of choices you can consider.
Learning Loop
The learning loop refers to the leader’s learning from his or her experiences and using honest, specific feedback from others to make better leadership choices the next time. Cycling through the learning loop is at the heart of effective leadership development.
Results
Your success as a leader can be seen through your measurable accomplishments and/or the impact you have on others. Results are the outputs achieved. While most are tangible, they may also be intangible (company reputation, goodwill, employee loyalty, etc.).