I believe every human is a potential leader. Taking ownership of who you are and how you show up to your life everyday is an act of leadership. By owning your story and your journey you are leading others, inspiring them to do the same and showing them that being in the driving seat of your life is possible.
It’s an old school view that only people who have people ‘below’ them are leaders. As Dee Hock, founder and CEO of Emeritus Visa International says, “Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivial.”
Imagine the leaders of our organisations, our governments, taking time to lead themselves, and from that place leading their superiors and peers, not in a dominant way, but in a self expressive, self-trusting, self-caring, self-believing kind of way. Imagine David Cameron really connecting to his internal strengths, seeing his resourcefulness and his creativity rather than, as so many politicians do, stepping into a cookie cutter approach to being at number 10.
It would take a new kind of thinking, one that starts at what we already have internally, and then looks outwards at where our strengths might be useful in the world. DC might find at his core, his true passion is growing organic veg. If he stepped into that we might see a decrease in vitamin deficiencies across the country, heck we might even see a reduction in the use of food banks, he’d stand empowered and confident in the face of pressures from his money hungry friends. What a strange twist of events that would be.
Anyway, enough of ‘our leader’, I’ve developed a framework for successful leadership, based on Dee Hock’s approach to leadership. It goes like this:
Step 3: Spend 15% leading your peers (Sharing ideas of what it means to lead yourself, collaborating on a level deeper than egos and personal agendas, recognising the combination of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts)
Step 4: Spend the rest of the time inspiring your ‘subordinates’ to step into their own leadership (and just see what happens when you do that – magic!)
So I invite you to take a look at where you fit within the framework, and whether you are paying enough attention (50% of your attention to be precise) to the way you are leading yourself.
And I want to hear from you! Let me know what you think, your experiences of leading yourself and others.