The Modern Leadership Issue - 10

LEADING TEAMS
THROUGH
LEADING SELF
by Jerry Hamburg
Modern leaders face numerous
challenges and increased demands
on their time and resources. To effectively
navigate this complexity requires us as
leaders to embrace simplicity and
prioritize self-leadership. It's tempting
to put all our focus on leading others,
functions, or organizations; yet it's
essential to understand that our personal
and professional development are
intertwined (each of us is one person,
albeit in various contexts). How we
lead ourselves impacts how we lead
everywhere else.
LEADING
TEAMS
AT THE CORE OF " LEADING SELF " IS THE
INTERPLAY OF WHERE YOU LOOK,
ATTENTION
WHERE YOU LOOK
A. Attention is a learned behavior.
We all know people who focus on the doom and the gloom. Sometimes, perhaps,
rightly. Other times, it is a habit of the mind developed over time. In 1890, the
pioneering psychologist William James wrote one of my favorite sentences ever: " My
experience is what I agree to attend to...only those items which I notice shape my
mind. " How might you agree to attend to the positive as well as the negative?
B. Attention takes work.
Like all behavior, attention takes energy and practice; and like any other skill, the
more you practice, the easier it gets. Our brains are extraordinary, with extraordinary
energy needs; at a resting state it requires nearly 20 percent of your daily calories.
The pool of available attention is finite, and the demands upon it are vast. Nobel Prize
laureate Herbert Simon coined the term " attention economy, " calling it the
" bottleneck of human thought " and noting that " a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention. " Does that sound familiar in your life?
A STORY OF LEADING SELF
An anecdote from a Fortune 100 CEO made
a lasting impression on me. In conversation,
they recounted a story about a member
of the C-suite who, while achieving results,
was leaving people feeling unsure of
themselves, due to the way his direction
was being delivered.
The CEO had a decision to make: do they
keep the person on the executive team?
The CEO recounted their thinking: a yes or
no could be easy. Getting results? Of course,
he stays. Negatively impacting people and
culture? Absolutely must go. The third way,
changing behavior, they knew would be hard
and potentially complicated. Interventions
could be long and costly. Yet, knowing
the teammate for years, they paid attention
to the great stories of him positively
impacting people's lives as well as the
negative incidents involving that leader.
Next, the CEO told me how they perceived
the situation. Sometimes the flip side of
a strength is a weakness; the CEO was able
to see, in the qualities that drove results,
which ones could be reframed to lessen the
negative impact on others.
The Modern Leadership Issue

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