What kind of leader are you?
And what kind of leader do you want to be?
Something I’ve noticed when supporting leaders is that it’s easy to discount just how much your existing perceptions of leadership are influencing your thoughts and behaviours.
Maybe you think of leaders as loud, or confident. Maybe you see them as pushy - or boring. Or perhaps in your world leadership means being a corporate robot - something you’re not prepared to be.
If your perceptions of leadership are unhelpful, this will stop you from creating a strong leadership identity. You’ll be sabotaging yourself because there’s a disconnect between who you think you are and what you think leadership means you need to be.
This blog helps you to get to the bottom of that by mapping out what has shaped the way you think about leadership.
Once you have a clear picture of the ‘systems’ that are subconsciously influencing your leadership style, you can choose which you want to lean into and which you want to leave behind.
How to map your views of leadership
This exercise explores your view of leadership by mapping how you’ve experienced leadership in the ‘systems’ to which you’ve belonged. It uses an adaption of the ‘Peacock’s Tail’ exercise from John Wittington’s book Systemic coaching and constellations. Here’s how you can use it.
Take a blank piece of paper and draw a peacock’s tail digram like this.
This represents your life and experiences stretching out behind you like a peacock’s tail
Each feather represents area of your life: family, education, work, pleasure
Each eyespot (line) represents a system within that area of your life eg, school, university and so on
Take some time to map out the systems to which you belonged using your peacock tail.
Now take some time to reflect on your experiences of leadership within each of these systems.
Who did/do you admire?
Who affected you negatively?
What traits did/do those who you saw as leaders portray?
What expectations did/do you have of them?
What expectations did/do others have of them?
Did/Do any disappoint you?
This exercise will show you your own perceptions of leaders from your experience. It gives you a clear picture of the current expectations you are consciously or sub-consciously putting on yourself.
Focusing on who you want to be, what you value, what you stand for and the impact you want to make puts you back in control. We all have blind spots and wobbles.
But what separate good leaders from great leaders is how honest they’re prepared to be with themselves and their openness to change.
If you want to work on your leadership identity, I've got a FREE Leadership Identity Audit to help. In under three minutes, I can show you the blind spots that are holding you back from your next-level of influence and impact immediately.
Get started here.