SELF LEADERSHIP

Dwarakanath CK (ckd@pegasusinstitute.com), Shyam Sundar M S (shyam@pegasusinstitute.com)

Pegasus Institute for Excellence, Bangalore

Abstract

Getting ourselves admitted into particular school/academy, attending the best of

colleges/universities and joining established companies/teams have been some of the popular
routes to achieving what we want to. But most of the accomplished people are actually those
who took charge of themselves, made their own choices in life and exercised their options
towards becoming what they wanted to and led a better life and with a higher well-being. In
this paper the authors have attempted to describe one model and the process of self-
leadership.

Keywords: Leadership, Self-discovery, Reflection, Competency, Motivation, SMART goal

Definition: Self-leadership is the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling

and behaviors to achieve your objective/s (Bryant & Kazan 2012) - [1].

Introduction

When an individual is clear about what s/he wants to achieve, the river is half crossed. It
requires lot of clarity, insight and awareness of self to understand what we are passionate
about. The authors who are L&D consultants, in their experience have found this question
challenging many of their participants. Having somewhat identified a ‘want’, many of us are
unsure if we have the required capabilities (what we can do) to become what we want to do.
Balancing the want with what we can and vice-versa is a long journey and to sustain we have
to do several things en-route [2]. This according to the authors is a self-discovery process
and a continuous one for those who want to lead themselves to success (in this paper refers to
doing what we want to do). The model and processes discussed are applicable to those who
seek continuous improvement. Self-leadership has to be developed and it can be
strengthened with practices such as getting in touch with self, in order to improving self-
awareness, own potential and our motives. A sustained development process and preferably
with a coach, one can indeed progress towards what we want to do and become [3].

What we want to do

Often we tend to confuse what we like with what we want. What we think we will like, need
not necessarily be what we want and we are capable of. Liking is typically cognitive, for
example a high-paying job, marrying the beauty in the city, annual holidays and so on. All
the likes come with certain demands and most of the times it is late realization. For example
during the IT boom, many youngsters wanted to be in IT for the glamour and lifestyle it
brings in. They understood the profession only after getting into it. The profession is
intellectually challenging and demanding. It suits those who like to research, be static in one
place (mostly in front of their computers). The motivation to do must be intrinsic and that
brings in the joy and required passion in the work. "Success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."--
Albert Schweitzer. One has to experiment with self, trying different options before deciding
what s/he wants to do. It is very rare in a country like India that people would dare and care
to change careers. It is only recent times that we find people making career shift easily;
engineers begin to sing or play cricket. Actors begin to model and sometimes begin directing
movies. Continued reflection is required to recognize what we want to do.

Get in touch with one self: Reflection practice is best suited for self-knowledge [4].
Reflection can be for an activity, during an activity or on an activity that we already
performed. Regular reflection helps us to discover ourselves and renew ourselves. Reflection
is best defined as a skill, more accurately a cluster of skills, involving observation, asking
questions and putting facts, ideas, and experiences together to add new meaning to them all. -
Dan Conrad & Diane Hedin- Youth Service: A guidebook for Developing, and Operating
Effective Program. Facilitators and coaches can initiate us into reflective practice and assist
us with appropriate stimuli for reflection. Reflection has to be done like mirror and has to
have true integrity if it has to succeed. Our humility to accept ourselves as we are seems to be
core capability required if we want to progress.

What we can do

All of us are having certain abilities (skills, knowledge and attitude called competency). Our
development initiatives have to be aimed at building capabilities that meet our functions and
roles that we hold in our family and organization. A role that does not fully utilize our
capabilities will underutilize us and on the contrary a role that demands different abilities can
be challenging and we may not fully meet the requirements. Either instance we are unhappy
and dissatisfied. We may have accepted roles for which we are not prepared and we may
have been denied role and position that fully utilizes our capabilities.

In case of former prime minister of India Mr.Rajiv Gandhi, he was made prime minister all of
a sudden and he had to learn the job while performing it. It must have been a challenging and
demanding period for him. If we recall Mahatma Gandhi, he toured India before he plunged
himself into the freedom movement to know the country, its people and prepare himself to
lead the freedom movement. Mr. Amitabh Bachhan the veteran actor, went through a patch
during which he would try (such as organizing Beauty Pageant shows) and did not succeed as
much. It is only after his core abilities were decoded (that being a celebrity or icon only at
that point of time); he marketed himself as a model and campaigned for BPL. Realizing our
potential requires recognition of our potential, remaining continuously motivated and being
effective.

Realizing own potential: Our premise for development is that human being is same in any
situation. If we want to discover ourselves, we need to place ourselves in situations and make
an honest evaluation. Next time when we take up a challenge, we can ask ourselves a
question, if we performed better than what we perceived as our potential. A person
understands / sees self-having some potential but during action, the performance could be
different. The possibility of achieving might be more than the perceived or the performed
potential. Most of the times we underestimated ourselves and sometimes we tend
overestimate ourselves. Reflecting on the task how often do we ask ourselves, ‘how could I
have done better? What risks could I have taken?’ Can we practice taking risk? Yes, unless
we overcome the fears and barriers in taking risk, we will never risk. That is why are advised
to take small steps so that we succeed and learn to risk. This practice can propel us towards
our actual potential which is different from our performance potential which again is different
from our perceived potential. Coaches can design simulations to help us recognize our true
potential.

Cricketer Mr. Sachin Tendulkar’s short stint as captain is a case for consideration. He and the
team were able to make out that captaincy was not his forte and he had to be relieved so that
he could achieve his potential in batting. It requires lots of honesty and courage to accept this
and give away a coveted position such as captain of Indian team.

Self-motivation: Self-motivation is about motivation from within and with less or no external
motivation. We need to learn to get in touch with our emotions and feelings. This again
comes by practice, we are so caught up in action that we give ourselves no time to reflect on
our experience (emotion and feeling). If we can get in touch with the feelings, we can explore
the triggers. We can identify and recognize those activities, tasks and events that have a
positive effect on us. It is wrong to assume that people work (only) for salary. In
organizations it is observed that employees do not appreciate each other. Celebration and
mutual appreciation is another practice that motivates us. Faults and deviations are discussed
more often than the small successes. Then we can choose to repeat the activities or tasks. We
can align our path to accommodate more of such tasks.

Being Effective: Our being is in a context and our success is mostly around a team or
community. Our contributions are mostly meaningless when not in context. Mr.Dhirubhai
Ambani ‘ s vision or dream to provide cellular phone connection for a price less than that of a
post card is an Indian context. We need to sense the context and make positive contributions
to the team. We can seek feedback from team if we are doubtful about the impact we created
on the task or the team or both. Roles are often not prescribed unless we are on a contract as
in an official position. We need to learn to assume roles that best fit us and make
contributions. What role can I take? We can consult the team and the team is best suited to
help in this decision.

What we have to do

Our aspirations are achievable but

require time and effort. It is important
that we learn to sustain ourselves with
our passion and persevere towards our
goals. In order to do this we have to
do certain things that are basic and
necessary. Abraham Maslow suggests
that we need go through the stages of
physiology, safety, love/belonging,
esteem needs before we self-actualize,
that is when we begin to converge on
what we want to do and what we can!!

We find most of the people choosing a career to do what they like and always wanted to do
such as teaching, social work, and philanthropy and sometimes venture funding and
mentoring the entrepreneurs. .
Our Indian former cricketer Mr. Krishnamachary Srikanth is an engineer and had his own
business. He would play cricket as that has been his passion. But he was wise enough not to
depend on cricket only for his livelihood and sustenance. He deployed his engineering and
business abilities to sustain himself.

Maslow’s theory of motivation or the hierarchy of needs is a good guideline to identify if we

are working at appropriate level and if we are on our path to maximizing our potential. Other
concepts that will help us to appreciate our journey better are competency (skill, knowledge,
and attitude/behaviour) and managing energy or bandwidth are some good ideas to begin
with. We can get ourselves administered with appropriate instruments such as Motivational
Analysis of Organizations – Behaviour (MAO-B) by Udai Pareekh, we can get ourselves
assessed on various competencies such as team work, leadership, communication and so on.

Enduring success: Enduring success in this discussion means to achieve repeated success. It
does not mean rising in level and becoming better and better in a particular field or work.
This can happen only if we periodically review our goals and capabilities assuming that we
are passionate about what we are doing. We also need to check on our values repeatedly and
use them as our guiding principles. Our Values help us to decide if we are doing the right
thing or not [5]. For example if we valued honesty we will stay away from corrupt practices.
If we valued life we would not kill.

It is very likely that we tend to raise the bar every time without revisiting our current location.
We have to be aware of the changes in our motivations, capability and passion over time;
they depend on our context in life (say, phase of life for instance). We have to learn to set
SMART goals and action to achieve them. Periodic review and re-visit to our, motives,
current passion and re-adjustment of goal can help in enduring success.

SMART goal: SMART is an abbreviation for Specific (can be simple or small), Measureable
(only those that are measureable can be improved), Achievable (to ensure success and
accommodate risk), Result oriented (to ensure positive impact on task or people) and Time
bound goals. It requires practice and skill to make a goal SMART. Eliyahu M Goldratt in his
book ‘Goal’ discusses the struggle of the executive and all his colleagues in setting goal!
Often people have learning and are grappling with the learning. We need to seek help (of
coaches) to set goals.

Summary

Self-Leadership is about being able to recognize our self in terms of wants (interests,
passion), capabilities (skills, knowledge and attitude/behaviour) and what we have to do to
sustain and grow. This is a continuous process and we need to adopt practices such as self-
discovery, becoming effective and working towards our actual potential. The practices are
simple to learn and we can be initiated into them by a coach and we can use the rest of the
world as our resource and leverage on it. The authors having worked with many learners,
they found that people need assistance for reflection, sensing the context, finding the right
reference (values) and setting goals in addition to initiation into practices. Dependency on
coach can be reduced or removed over a period of time once we acquire some expertise in all
these practices..
References:

1. Andrew Bryant, (2012) , Self-leadership definition

2. Dwarakanath CK, Chandrima Bannerjee, (2014) , Self-Leadership: Notes from
Design of Student Development Programme held at Praxis School of Management,
Kolkata
3. Kathryn J. Deiss , Personal Leadership, , Association of College & Research Libraries
Content Strategist, kdeiss@ala.org, Dominican University, School of Library &
Information Science, California, US
4. Maria Bartiromo, Catherine Whitney (2010) The 10 Laws of Enduring
Success, Crown Business Crown publications
5. Excellence by Design, ww.johnspence.com