Tag Archives: Harvard Business Review

04-Managing a project team, team dynamics, team roles

Discovering Your Authentic Leadership

1 Comment

This Harvard Business Review  article outlines how to be an authentic leader and explains that you do not have to be born with a specific set of characteristics that labels you a leader. Rather authentic leadership develops from a multiple of facets that make up ones life. Their study shows that you do not have to be in a high position at your organization or wait for that tap on the shoulder to be recognized or portray authentic leadership.

The authors and their research team surveyed over a 125 leaders at multiple levels. This proved to be one of the most extensive study on leadership development.  The team wanted to know how these leaders developed their leadership skills. They found that after “Analyzing 3,000 pages of transcripts, our team was startled to see you do not have to be born with specific characteristics or traits of a leader. Leadership emerges from your life story”.

One of their interviewees was Ann Fudge, Chairman and CEO for Young & Rubicam. She stated, “All of us have the spark of leadership in us, whether it is in business, in government, or as a nonprofit volunteer. The challenge is to understand ourselves well enough to discover where we can use our leadership gifts to serve others”.

There are 7 areas in which the authors express make up authentic leaders. Please read below for a brief description of these 7 areas.

1) Learning from Your Life Story – Many leaders use life experiences and happenings to help motivate their leadership. They use these experiences to give meaning to their lives and find the inspiration to lead.

2) Knowing Your Authentic Self -This article expresses that one of the most important capabilities of a leader to possess, is to have self awareness. As time goes on many leaders who may find benefits from the outside world such as money, fame, and power will eventually feel like something is missing. These leaders have left no time for them to understand and develop the inside part of their leadership.

3) Practicing Your Values and Principles – The article explains “leadership principles are values translated into action. Having a solid base of values and testing them under fire enables you to develop the principles you will use in leading”.

4) Balancing Your Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivations – It is easy to get caught up in the external motivators such as promotions or financial rewards, but in the end of the day intrinsic motivators work closer with your values and will be more fulfilling then extrinsic motivations.

5) Building Your Support Team – Authentic leaders maintain strong relationships in multiple forms. These relationships help them continue their forward movement. These relationships can include family, mentors, colleagues, and close friends.

6) Integrating Your Life by Staying Grounded – This can be very challenging for many leaders. It is important to integrate a balance between work, family, friends, health, and even spiritual practices. This allows leaders to maintain an authenticity.

7) Empowering People to Lead – An authentic leader recognizes that leadership is not defined by their success but rather the success of an organization by empowering leaders at all levels. Authentic leaders will motivate and encourage people to lead.

I found that this HBR article offered a great perspective of what we can focus on to develop our abilities as authentic leaders. We do not have to wait to start becoming the leaders we want to be, the best time to start is now using our life stories and experiences to lead the way.

I want to end with my favorite quote from the article.

“Authentic leaders demonstrate a passion for their purpose, practice their values consistently, and lead with their hearts as well as their heads. They establish long-term, meaningful relationships and have the self-discipline to get results. They know who they are.”

Here is pdf version of the article

Discovering Your Authentic Leadership 

07a-Crafting an effective formal presentation, 07c-Telling stories, 07d-Delivering a presentation, metaphors, Uncategorized

Storytelling: Displaying the Struggle Between Expectation and Reality

Leave a comment

Most of us in the evening MBA program are knowledge workers.  We don’t work with our hands, we don’t physically produce goods, we either create, analyze or transfer knowledge. Transferring knowledge from one person to another is the most challenging, because no two people think in the exact same way, but also the most important, because it is what drives change. Whether its giving a presentation, writing an important email, or having a tough conversation, my instinct is to fall back on my engineering background and rely on data and facts – and more often then not, doing this doesn’t inspire action.

The Harvard Business Review conducted an interview with screenwriting coach Robert McKee called “Storytelling That Moves People.”  In the interview, McKee talks about how storytelling is a crucial skill for business leaders to be able to motivate their coworkers, customers and partners to navigate through business challenges. McKee describes two types of storytelling that business leaders use.  The first uses conventional rhetoric and statistics, which, if successful, persuades people only on an intellectual level, which doesn’t inspire people to act. The second method of storytelling is to unite an idea with an emotion to persuade people on an emotional level and get them to act.

In the conversation, McKee describes the most difficult part of effective emotional persuasion through story-telling:  discussing the struggle. We all have a tendency, especially at work, to paint a rosy picture.  We want to be viewed as always succeeding, always in control, and always right.  McKee argues that story without a struggle doesn’t inspire because it doesn’t connect people on an emotional level about the challenges we all face.  To be a good storyteller,  according to McKee, “you want to display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness.”  McKee goes further to say that “the energy to live comes from the dark side…as we struggle against these negative powers, we’re forced to live more deeply, more fully.”

As an engineer working for a marketing company, the most difficult part of my job is persuading others to act while not falling back on data and statistics, and not painting a rosy picture.  Even though its challenging, telling stories that include a struggle has a tendency to unite people as they think about adversity in their own jobs, which usually causes them to rally around your goals.

As McKee says in the article, being a great storyteller alone won’t make you a great leader, but it is a skill that will help make you a better leader and help you to inspire action in others.  You can access the article through the Goizueta Business Library website, through the “Business Source Complete” database (search “Storytelling That Moves People”).

Source:

Fryer B. Storytelling That Moves People. Harvard Business Review [serial online]. June 2003;81(6):51-55. Available from: Business Source Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed July 12, 2014.