Over many years, we have had the privilege of working with a large number of senior leaders and managers from different organizations all over the world. While many of them have impressed us as individuals with high achievement and even higher aspirations, many have not yet reached their full potential. In recent years, we've noticed that more of these individuals are expressing doubt about their role as leaders. Sometimes they aren't clear about what they should be doing or where they should be heading as leaders. Some are frustrated, conflicted, or downright unhappy. Some wonder if leading is worth the time, effort, and sacrifices they have to make.
We believe doubt has increased because of the growing complexity of the leadership tasks and the interconnected world in which we live. The speed of technological developments, rate of change, economic challenges, the daily pressures to meet ever more aggressive goals, and the 24/7 access expected of leaders have left many people with too few hours and too little energy to bring their best leadership to bear. As a result, leaders have begun to question their abilities, the direction their life has taken, and their hopes for future impact. We label this as the problem of drift.
All of us will experience drift at some point in our lives; the authors of this book have experienced drift multiple times during their careers as leaders. As leaders or aspiring leaders, we cannot be clear about every step to take at every moment in time. The problem occurs if we stay adrift too long. Long-term drift is risky because we will make decisions by default rather than conscious choice. Being a leader requires personal enthusiasm, vision, and constant energy. If we lack these characteristics, we cause problems for ourselves and for people with whom we work.
We wrote this book to encourage you to make conscious choices about why, when, how, and where you lead. In our experience, the ability to be clear about these choices helps you achieve greater personal success as a leader and as a person. Discovering the Leader in You is about helping you gain personal insight into how leadership fits in your life, the unique qualities you bring to leadership, and the impact you want to have on the world as a leader.
The book reflects our belief that many people can benefit from a conscious, systematic approach to understanding how their leadership vision, values, skills, and motivations match up with their organizational and personal realities. Our hope is to help individuals move out of states of drift and into confident action, whether they are facing a concrete leadership career decision or simply examining their reaction to an organizational change.
We believe that leadership happens at all levels in organizations, families, and communities. There are many opportunities to lead regardless of whether you hold a formal leadership position. Therefore, this revised edition of Discovering the Leader in You is intended to help the new employee fresh out of college, the senior executive hoping to clarify the right next step, or the volunteer working at a grassroots organization. As you will see in this book, even the most senior leaders are on a journey of clarifying who they are as leaders and discovering how to improve their effectiveness. The most effective leaders come to understand that the leadership journey is an ongoing, dynamic process without a clear beginning, middle, and end.
We hope that this book addresses the quest that many leaders have to walk a path of leadership filled with purpose and meaningful impact. We also hope it will be attractive to coaches, counselors, curriculum developers, human resource executives, and university professors, all of whom work with individuals to help them lead happier and more successful lives.
Finally, we hope this book reaches people who have not been seriously considering leadership opportunities. We believe strongly that the problems we face in the world today are largely a result of poor leadership and that the solutions to these problems will be the result of strong leadership. Leaders must not always be selected from the socioeconomic elite; there's too much leadership work to be done, and it's too important to leave to a narrow cross section of the world's population.
This book is designed around a systematic framework that connects who you are as a leader (your vision, values, and profile) to the realities of your organizational context and the realities of your personal life. By examining the demands and expectations on you as a leader and person, you can better match your talents to the opportunities surrounding you.
The framework is based on five key topics:
Current organizational realities. The organizational context differs by individual. It can be as broad as the social, economic, and global trends affecting leadership today. It might be more specific to your industry, your organization, or your leadership role. The goal is to understand the broader circumstances that influence your current leadership situation, as well as the demands and expectations of leaders.
Leadership vision. What is the role that leadership plays in your life? We believe that being purposeful about what you want in life is important to being purposeful about what you want as a leader. A leadership vision helps you out of drift. Without an articulate leadership vision, you will have a difficult time evaluating the leadership choices in front of you.
Leadership values. Values are the standards or principles that guide your beliefs, decisions, and actions. Understanding your values and leveraging them as a foundational cornerstone of your leadership choices is a critical contributor to effective leadership. Examining your motivations and values may give you more insight into why you feel adrift.
Leadership profile. Your leadership profile is your personal leadership tool kit and what you draw from to lead. It can include many things, such as competencies, styles, and experiences. Through careful analysis of your profile, you can assess what you see as your strengths and developmental needs. Your leadership profile further defines who you are as a leader and what you bring to leadership roles.
Current personal realities. You have a personal life that has an impact on your work life and a work life that has an impact on your personal life. Often we tend to compartmentalize these two areas of our lives when we would benefit by thinking in a more integrated and holistic way. At the end of the day, you are one person, whether you are at work, on vacation, or at home. How you integrate all aspects of your life with your responsibilities as a leader is one of the most challenging tasks you will face.
We devote a chapter to each topic of the framework. Our final chapter then guides you through a process for synthesizing data and identifying themes and patterns across the sections of the framework. This synthesis provides a valuable picture for who you are as a leader and the circumstances in which you lead best. The final step is to describe the direction you wish to go as a leader and set goals that will help you get there.
All authors stand on the shoulders of those who worked the terrain before them. We acknowledge the many shoulders we have stood on to gain strength, a vision for the future, and a strong foundation to withstand the challenges that we have faced as leaders. To our colleagues at CCL, thank you for helping us along the path of our own leadership journeys.
We received wonderful support and guidance from our colleague in the CCL publications group, Peter Scisco, who gave us ideas, kept us on track, and reviewed each and every sentence we wrote. Our developmental editor extraordinaire in San Francisco, Alan Venable, took our words and sharpened their focus. Felecia Corbett in the CCL library painstakingly researched references (always with a smile on her face), and Pauline Vail at CCL helped with a number of technical aspects of putting together this book. Thanks to each of you. We also want to recognize and thank Marcia Horowitz, who was an instrumental and valuable contributor to the first edition. Without her, we wouldn't be working on this revised edition.
Most important, we thank our families who supported our disappearance for hours on end, including nights, weekends, and vacations, so that we could write this book. We couldn't have completed this book without the daily tangible and emotional support of our spouses: Craig, Judith, and Mary. We dedicate this book to our children, Thomas Chappelow, Andrew Chappelow, Ben Chappelow, Rebecca Altman, Emily Altman, David Lee, Mark Lee, and Andrea Lee and her children, Becky and Orin Carlson-Lee. We know that the journey of discovering your own leadership paths will make the world a better place.
December 2010
Sara N. King
Greensboro, North Carolina
David G. Altman
Greensboro, North Carolina
Robert J. Lee
New York, New York