Five Words that will Increase Your Leadership Impact

How can you free yourself to lead authentically?

Download the Core Values Workbook here - https://files.constantcontact.com/429e4631601/60abcbac-16c2-4321-b051-a97eb3a63aa5.pdf

How do we learn how to lead authentically? There are myriad books and theories on leadership but while they can all provoke interesting reflection, none of them can direct you as to how to be the most authentic and impactful leader YOU can be. Each of us has our own unique form of leadership and in this week’s episode, I discuss how to uncover what’s at the core of your unique and brilliant leadership identity. 

Transcript

Adina: (00:00)
[inaudible]

Adina: (00:03)
But the truth is every single person needs to find their version, their best leadership, their most authentic leadership. Hi, this is Adina here with today's episode of courage,

Adina: (00:18)
To be curious with Adina Tovell. And if you joined us last week, you know that we have relaunched our podcast show for about four years. The podcast show of courage to be curious was called wonder your way to brilliant. We are now encouraged to be curious with Adina Tovell, but do not fear. We are still wondering our way to brilliant every single week with powerful questions and deep inquiry into our lives, our leadership and our relationships. You may have caught it in the last episode, but in case you didn't the way our podcast is organized is that every month there is a theme, we are in July. So the month is around freedom. And each week we look through a different lens, the live lens, the Lee lens, or the love lens. At the end of the month, we have a conversation with some of our incredibly courageous curious partners out there and guests, people who I know are just going to add tremendous value to our life dialogue about the monthly theme. And so this week we are focusing on the lead lens, leading with the courage to be curious. And I'm getting curious about how leadership relates to freedom or how people find their freedom to be authentic as leaders. This is really my area of focus

Adina: (01:42)
For about 20 plus years. I've been designing and leading professional development with leaders and I've worked with many people. And one of the things that I find is that no matter whether somebody is newly moving into a leadership position, or if somebody is a seasoned leader, so one of the issues that's the same across the board is this sense of, am I doing it right? Like, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? Am I doing it as well as I could be leading is scary, especially when you are a people leader. And what I've worked with people on is sometimes they go from, you know, frontline roles where you have a position or even a leadership role. That's, non-supervisory where it's your experience with the task or a skill or an expertise. That's really the focus, you know how to do something really well.

Adina: (02:38)
My brother-in-law's an epidemiologist, and I know that for a long time, he was doing the work of an epidemiologist and he was in the science and that felt really comfortable for him. Then eventually you get promoted up and when you get promoted up, now, your job is no longer to be the expert in the skill or task because you've hired other people or there's other people below you whose job it is to be the expert. You're still upleveling your information and all that kind of thing. But now you have an entirely new major responsibility, which is to be a people leader. How do you inspire support guide, steer those people in a direction that's going to be productive for the organization. That's going to help them thrive. And it's really going to help you feel secure in your role that you're doing a good job.

Adina: (03:35)
There's not a lot of training. I remember the first time I got promoted into my first people leadership job, and I was a senior director in a nonprofit organization. And so I went from a job where I was pretty much only responsible for myself. And then I went into a job where I had a division of 24 hours and I didn't have one, one bit or one minute of training on what I needed to do differently. Right. I applied for the job. I had a really good application. I did great in the interview. And then suddenly I had 24 people that I was supervising or the division I was in charge of. And then I show up at my first staff meeting. And how do you know how to do that stuff? And there's problems. There's budgets to manage. There's external partners to deal with, or is your internal people.

Adina: (04:25)
And everybody's looking to you. It took me actually a while to realize that how much of an impact a leader actually has. I walked into my position and I know so many people walk into their positions thinking like, I'm just me. Right. You know, I'm just me. I put on my pants the same way you do. I have kids. I fumble things all the time. I make mistakes. I dropped the spaghetti, like all of those normal, everyday things like I'm just a human. So why does what I say or do carry so much weight? Why is everybody looking to me for the answers? Or why is everybody thinking that I have all of the answers? And I remember even thinking like, why are people afraid to come to me? When somebody first said to me, someone was afraid to come to you. And I thought, what am I like?

Adina: (05:14)
I didn't feel like there was anything scary about me. What started to Dawn on me though, is that, and people, leadership, being a people, a leader at any level, and again, you could be in a volunteer organization. It doesn't matter. But if you are leading other people or they see you as leader, everything that you say and do is impacting them, even just the position that you have is impacting them. And I realized, what does it mean to become that person? What does it mean to fully take responsibility for the fact that I am in a position where people are going to be looking, people are wanting to know what I have to say, where people are taking guidance from what I do and how I direct and steer it a really big responsibility. And I remember, okay, well, I didn't have any trainings. So just go on instinct and I would just start off and all right, I gotta make this decision.

Adina: (06:16)
I gotta make that decision. I have to lead this meeting. I have to lead that meeting. And, you know, you make your mistakes and you pick yourself back up and you go ahead and you do it again. And I went through a couple positions like this, um, in different places, a couple different organizations, one where I was running an organization and a board and all of those things. And it took me a while to realize that I didn't have very specific guideposts. Like how did I know how to make the decisions? How did I know I was being consistent in any way? How did I know what I was conveying as what was most important to me leader?

Adina: (06:54)
I learned about a practice that now I have been using with leaders for years and years and have found it to be so profound. It's profound because it's liberating. As a leader just was an identifying my own five core values. What is a core value? A core value is a fundamental belief system. It is something that really sits at the heart of who we are, how we think, what we believe and how we act. And sometimes when people do this exercise, I have to guide them because the original inclination is to try to identify things and say, oh yeah, I want to be that. Or that's a good one. I should have that one on my list. And I'll say to them, it's not about there's none here that are better. In fact, I probably have close to a hundred, uh, core values on my list that I use in this exercise.

Adina: (07:50)
I said, there's none here that are better than others, but there are some here that are truer for you than others truer for you than others. That the goal of this exercise is not to pick the best five. That the goal of this is to identify which five have already been guiding you in this moment, in those moments, when you felt most deeply aligned to yourself, you felt most proud. You felt most confident, you felt like you did a good job. You felt like you were in alignment with the best of you. And what we do is we take all these moments from their life, from their leadership, from home life. It doesn't really matter across the board because we are who we are, whether we're at home or work or any place else where are just 1%. So we take all these events and then we pull out and we say, what were your guideposts in those moments, when you really felt like you were the best of you, we also look at the moments where people get most triggered, what things that happen, get you most activated.

Adina: (09:04)
I mean, I find it so interesting sometimes when I have conversations with people and one thing that triggers one person is so unimportant to someone else, you know, that they can be having a conversation and somebody could talk about, I mean, I even think about it, things that go on at home, you know, whether or not you put water in the dirty dishes, or you just leave the dishes in the sink, right. I could care less, but they've got water. They don't go up. They don't have water on them, but somebody else could really care. But in the workplace, the idea of using proper grammar, right? I mean, I worked when I was executive director, I had a grim Marion on my board. And so everything I would write and she was really, really particular. It absolutely infuriated her. If things went out and had any grammatical errors on it, and then other people didn't care when it comes down to our core values, though, one of the ways to detect what kinds of things are most important to us is by our successes and what feels aligned, but also by what triggers us most.

Adina: (10:06)
And through this, uh, you know, kind of evidence-based approach of looking at these kinds of experiences, we can identify what are the five guideposts that really do define me. What's most important to me. And from that place, there is so much freedom because if I'm going to be a leader in an organization, I want to be my best version of a leader. There's no handbook or rule book that says the perfect leader does ABCD. And he has this kind of style. Exactly does this and these ways in these circumstances. I mean, there's all kinds of trainings out there that you can get, how to be a leader or how to, you know, execute leadership skills in particularly situations. But the truth is every single person needs to find their version of their best leadership, their most authentic leadership and finding your five core values has been one of the most powerful ways that I have seen, or that I've experienced.

Adina: (11:09)
And that I've used to do this because the liberation comes with now, you know, when you're stuck, you're not sure what decision to make. You're not sure how to respond to a situation. You go back to your five guideposts and I've never seen them fail in being able to guide how do I lead in this moment? It's one of the reasons that companies create core values. And we can all tell the difference between companies that have core values and abide by them. When the going gets tough and companies who have core values that are pretty much just written somewhere, but don't seem to be reflected and how they do business internally or how they do business externally.

Adina: (11:58)
But when we have them, that's where the freedom, that's where the liberation is. I know I have guide posts for how to grow into becoming the most authentic and impactful version of leadership that I can be. And so that's my invitation to you. And it doesn't matter. Are you leading your household? Are you leading in your classroom? Are you leading in your volunteer organization? Are you leading in your company? It doesn't matter, but my invitation to you is to explore your core values, find out what they are. And when I take people through it, I have a really specific method that I do because I want them to get really particular in how they define them. Because again, I will tell you the most popular core value that gets chosen when I do this exercise with people is integrity. And so it ends up on a lot of people's lists.

Adina: (12:55)
It's not actually on mine, but it ends up in a lot of people's lists. And then I have them define it. And what happens. I've never had two people define it the same way. So just having words doesn't mean anything. It's the meaning behind those words that are important. And so I always take people through a piece of the exercise to be able to do that. So this is my invitation to you. If you want to feel freer in how you lead, you're not going to be perfect. You're going to make mistakes, but you need some guideposts and beginning with your core values is a great way to be able to do that. And I'm going to, with, along with this podcast, I will have access to an exercise that we have that begins to help people to articulate their core values. And we want to invite you to locate that, to grab it and begin to use that for yourself as well.

Adina: (13:51)
So thank you for listening to today's episode, make sure you follow us on our social media out there. Our handle is courage to be curious. If you have comments or feedback for us, you can leave it on any of our social media. You can email us@infoatcouragetobecurious.com. We'd also like to encourage you to sign up for our newsletter because courage to be curious if this is your cup of tea, if you feel like this is your community, these are the things you'd like to think about and talk about, sign up for our newsletter, because that's how we can stay in touch with you. Let you know about programs that we have special offerings that are coming up and, you know, just keep you in the know of everything that's happening through courage, to be curious, and then keep joining us as we continue to explore this concept of freedom next week through the love lens,

Adina: (14:39)
[inaudible].