“You do not write your life with words…You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.” – Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls.
Creating your Leadership Principles is about taking charge of what you stand for and how you want to be perceived. I call them rules of engagement or behaviours and they are not exclusive to the work place but they also matter in our personal lives.
Leadership Principles or Personal Principles should become an integral part of your leadership presence and personal brand. Whether you are ambitious and want to have a career or you are currently enjoying a stable, long-term job, your boss, peers and team members (if you have any), are judging your behaviours and actions on a daily basis.
Don’t leave the perceptions of others to be accidental but be deliberate and intentional about what signals you are sending into your environment.
Increasing awareness about your personal brand is about asking yourself:
How do others experience me?
What do they think and feel about me?
What stories and images come to their mind when they talk about me?
Unless you are prepared to ask them these questions directly, I would advise you to first and foremost rely on your own self-reflection and empathy skills: Write about how you perceive yourself, how others might be perceiving you and adjust the observations as you go along. Remember that self-reflection is a process and strive to write as honestly as you can. This is also a great exercise for getting to know yourself better, your strengths and weaknesses.
Arriving at the clear picture of where you are at the moment is essential. But don’t leave it there.
Meaning is found with one foot in order and other in chaos (J. Peterson) and the current picture likely represent your so called “order” – it is easy for you to be this way, it takes no effort. This is your comfort zone.
But how would your “chaos” look like? How do you aspire to be? This doesn’t mean aspiring to be an entirely different person but taking what is authentic to you already and building upon it. I call it leveraging the strengths. For example, you can build on behaviours that are easier to learn, such as improving listening skills, or behaviours that are harder to learn, such as becoming a more reliable team player. Either way, whatever you decide to aspire to, has to be of value to you and hopefully the organisation you belong to.
Therefore, one way of creating an aspirational vision is to think about how to further leverage or strengthen your positive attributes.
Another way of creating an aspiration is to craft your own leadership narrative or your own leadership story. This is a story about you:
Who you are,
What you represent and
What’s been your history so far.
Again it is about your values, deeper commitments and why people should trust you. I believe that leadership narrative can be and should be crafted by anyone who cares about their integrity, learning and improving, and not only by political leaders and big CEOs.
Remember, you can influence how others perceive you. Start with self-reflection of how you perceive yourself and how others might be perceiving you. Think about your strengths and weaknesses. Then, create your aspirational vision of your personal brand by leveraging your strengths and creating your leadership (personal) narrative.
As “A Monster Calls” says, life is written with actions (paraphrasing).
Knowing what you know now, would you still behave the same way? How would your Leadership (Personal) Principles look now?
Image: Alamy, Demi Moore in A Few Good Man, 1992.