Leadership: Know Yourself
There are about a million (really, I’ve counted them) blogs and articles that articulate what leadership is. Many great business figures and authors have added their own thoughts on this. From the business world, Peter Drucker proposes, ‘Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations’. For Ken Blanchard, ‘The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority’. Bill Gates predicts, ‘As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others’.
‘It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front,’ wrote the inspirational leader Nelson Mandela, ‘especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership’.
My favourite definition of leadership was offered by Maya Angelou: ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel’. If you aspire to becoming a project leader, this empathetic approach to people will be the foundation for success in everything you do.
To become a leader, you don’t need an MBA or PhD or project management qualification or Nobel Prize. Nor do you automatically become one when you have ‘manager’ or ‘director’ in your job title. To become a leader you need to make a decision. You need to decide whether you want to serve others and be the kind of person they aspire to be. Or not.
If you don’t want to serve others and be a role model, that’s totally fine. Being a project leader isn’t for everyone; after all, if everyone in the world was a leader, we’d get nothing done!
If you’re still determined, then you’re on the wrong side of a lot of hard, but ultimately rewarding, work on the journey to becoming a more emotionally intelligent version of yourself, starting with changing the way you behave, talk, listen, laugh, deal with poor performance and innovate. It’s possible you’ll have to completely reinvent who you are. You’ll have to identify and learn about the stuff you’re not so great at and spend your weekends cramming, reading books, blogs and magazines, and mapping out new routines to change old habits.
For far too long the corporate world has downplayed the importance of emotional intelligence, dismissing it as one of the ‘soft’ skills, which are among the hardest things to change.
In his ground-breaking book Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, Daniel Goleman identified emotional intelligence (EQ) as the key differentiator for leaders. ‘What makes the difference between stars and others is not their intelligent IQ, but their emotional EQ.’
This is every bit as true today as it was 24 years ago, and it will remain so into the future, not just for us but for our children too.
A 2017 Harvard Business Review article predicted, ‘Skills like persuasion, social understanding and empathy are going to become differentiators as AI and machine learning take over other tasks’. Not only is it good for continued relevance, but another study found that ‘people who have a high EQ have been proved to be happier in their lives, and more productive in their work, than those with low EQ’.
Emotional intelligence is a learnt skill. And like any worthwhile accomplishment, it isn’t always easy. However, developing yourself and inspiring people who put their reputations on the line for you are among the greatest rewards you can get in the corporate world.
You will have to unlearn some things and work hard to learn others. You will have to challenge your assumptions and beliefs, and to listen when you’d rather be talking. Mostly, though, you will have to make time for all this and to make becoming the best version of yourself a priority.
You need to make the time to understand and work through what it means to be emotionally intelligent, to know how to recognise when you’ve got it right and to celebrate the win!
When the projects and programs you have managed are held in high regard, when people want to work with you again, when you’re held up as a role model for others, then you’ll know what it means to be emotionally intelligent and you’ll be halfway to becoming a great project leader.
‘All you can change is yourself,’ Gary W. Goldstein argues, ‘but sometimes that changes everything!’ Self-awareness is perhaps the biggest challenge to developing as a person. The ability to look ourselves in the mirror, admit our flaws, celebrate what we’re good at and actively seek feedback isn’t something we’re all blessed with.
And this self-knowledge isn’t enough in itself. You have to use it to analyse what you do before committing to change, and change you must if you are to achieve the goals you’ve set yourself. Sometimes you’ll need to change the way you communicate, while at others you’ll need to reset a habit or behaviour. Abraham Maslow said, ‘Self-knowledge and self-improvement are very difficult for most people. It usually needs great courage and long struggle’. But don’t let this stop you!
All too often in the project management world, people forget to look at themselves while insisting that others are to blame for the problems they are encountering.
A few years back a friend of mine introduced me to the Dunning–Kruger Effect. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Cornell University students David Dunning and Justin Kruger found, through a series of experiments, that unskilled employees weren’t as good as they thought they were — or, as the Harvard Business Review titled their article ‘Those Who Can’t, Don’t Know It’.
The Dunning–Kruger Effect may come as something of a surprise to you, unless of course it speaks to you personally, in which case you probably already knew it all too well. The researchers found that incompetent people (their words) didn’t recognise their own lack of skills or the extent of it. Worse, they couldn’t recognise the skills that others had either. Results from a follow-up study suggested that with ‘minimal tutoring’ on the skills they were previously deficient in, people were better able to understand their skill level. Or, if you prefer, they were more aware of their own shortcomings.
The resulting paper, ‘Unskilled and unaware of It: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments’, is definitely worth reading, and perhaps passing on to others you feel might benefit from it (cough).
The easiest way to become more self-aware is to ask others for their honest opinions of your behaviour and performance. Choose people who know you well and have seen you in action. It might be a project sponsor, a team member, a fellow project manager or a line manager familiar with your work. It’s important that you ask them about your behaviour, as this is something we can often miss in the heat of the moment.
You have to welcome and be prepared for frank and critical feedback. You should also repeat this regularly and show your gratitude for their time and effort (see chapter 13).
Something I like to do is document how certain situations made me feel and how I responded to them. This is particularly important if you seek to change a behaviour, but it’s also useful if you want to become more aware of how you react emotionally in different contexts. Write it down as soon as possible after the event. It will be invaluable to your development as a leader.
It’s also important to acknowledge the things you’re good at, as self-awareness isn’t just about the bad stuff. While you won’t be cartwheeling down the corridor screaming ‘I can plan, I can plan, I can plan’, these positive affirmations should give you the confidence that your skills and behaviours have been recognised and provide an emotional springboard to improvement in other areas.
There are many benefits to being more self-aware, including:
- greater personal contentment
- improved relationship building
- improved collaboration
- enhanced respect from peers
- reduced stress and anxiety.
In his book Emotional Capitalists, Martyn Newman rates self-awareness as the number one component to becoming more emotionally intelligent. Once you’ve received feedback on something you weren’t aware of, and have taken action to change it, you’ll recognise why it’s so important.
ACTIONS
DO: Ask for regular feedback on your performance and behaviours.
DON’T: Think the Dunning–Kruger Effect only happens to other people.
WATCH: Rosalinde Torres’s TED talk, ‘What it takes to be a great leader’ (‘Knowing what I’m good at, and not so good at, makes me a better leader’).