Leading from the Center of Excellence (Part 1)
To lead and live authentically is to lead from your center of excellence. What exactly does that mean? Authentic leadership is a values-driven leadership. If you are wavering on what exactly are the values driving your life, it will be almost impossible to claim authenticity. This is because authentic behaviors are internally guided by a leader’s true self, anchored on core values.
Authentic leaders build their reputation on being trustworthy, having high moral values, possessing integrity, and having positive psychological capacities in their leadership roles and as leadership models through self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing and internal moral perspective.
These four elements help anyone desiring to lead from the center of excellence to build that core. These behaviors contribute to emotional and cognitive development and transformation of organizational members.
Self-awareness is the beginning of building the center of excellence from which everything else springs from. It is the foundation of the core on which all the other elements converge.
So, what is self-awareness?
Let me start by explaining what self-awareness is not. Self-awareness is beyond knowing your personality type and the characteristics of your personality type (and I am a big fan of personality assessments). Personality type knowledge is useful, don’t get me wrong but it is probably the elementary step in self-awareness.
Self-awareness refers to the individual or a leader’s intrapersonal knowledge—the leader’s understanding and deep insights of himself/herself/themself including strengths and weaknesses.
To know yourself is not a magic wand. It requires taking specific actions to learn about yourself through your experiences, introspection and self-regulation. It is this knowledge that helps you as a person or leader to organize and give meaning to your behavior and your environment.
This meaning making is fundamental to building a strong and values-based center of excellence from which to lead and live authentically. Self-awareness is both internal and external and there must be congruence between the internal and external expressions.
Authenticity is based on one understanding and being true to self.
How do you develop self-awareness?
How do you go about making meaning from your experiences and leading from the core of excellence and courage?
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