How to grow as a leader → the Leader Mindset
How to Grow as Leader: Why Personality Development and Leadership are Important
Leader Mindset
Takeaway: A person's mindset contributes substantially to their success in or out of the office. Being aware of performance mindsets at work and focusing on strategies from the abilities of mindsets, can help increase influence on a team and make a big impact on employees, colleagues and an organization.
Table of Contents:
A key to effective leadership is the ability to be self-aware
Leaders who are self-aware are able to better monitor their own emotions and responses. They have an awareness of their strengths and weaknesses and more often, have a higher level of emotional intelligence.
Self-awareness
See this as the ability to recognize your emotional and mental states at the moment and then to adjust the state accordingly to stay at a healthy level of emotional balance.
In addition, self-awareness means not just seeing ourselves within our own minds, but also how we are in relation to others and the world around us. How we lead into the future or do we lead by holding on to the past. Self-awareness can challenge us to develop skills through learning and understanding the difference of individual effort. Effort and the definition of hard work can vary drastically between individuals.
What happens when our sense of self is distorted? When we live life holding on to deep-rooted insecurities, worry about hypothetical issues, pursue other people's goals or see only the risks in life?
Deliberative mindset
A mindset that focuses on finding things that are wrong, why something will not work, and seeing only the limits will condition the brain to filter for exactly that. It is often a challenge to engage employees when what is wrong is focused on continuously.
You will find what you are looking for.
Having self-awareness will also allow you to have a strong sense of situational awareness. It will allow you to notice efforts and struggle with employees and recognize how different abilities, learning styles, skills and mindsets contribute to the situation.
Situational awareness
Situational awareness allows you to see things from a variety of levels and perspectives which improves decision making and communication with others, it’s the essence in cultivating a Leader Mindset.
A key to effective leadership is to be self-aware and stay focused on the efforts of moving forward in striving to be a true leader. A humble leader who takes responsibility and is continuously focused on not just their leadership development but the development in others, is intuitive to situational awareness as well.
Self-help and personality development is an important part of leadership development
Once you develop your level of self-awareness skills, you'll be able to clearly identify parts of yourself that need more development, or perhaps just some fine-tuning and slight adjusting.
Because improving oneself never really ends. For a leader, this is crucial and can keep you on top of your game. It's important to get out of your comfort zone.
“Know thyself”
As a leader, others look to you for guidance, for learning, new ideas and to be a great example. In addition, research also finds that employees will look toward leaders for emotional support, clear direction, and encouragement.
Value in Feedback
Whether they admit to that or not. Most employees appreciate and value feedback. They like to know that they matter.
You may know your job extremely well and excel highly in your field. This depth of knowledge probably got you into the role you are in now.
However, it's the inner work, the leader's self-development, that will take you to the next level. Self-help work for leaders should include a distinct focus on personality development.
What does that mean specifically?
It means knowing how to understand one's level of esteem and confidence, to clearly see how you react or change under pressure and have the ability to perceive if others really hear you, or are dismissing you.
Growth mindset in leadership
We all have an identifiable mindset. It is based on our beliefs and it's what runs how we see and behave in the world; it's the foundation for decisions we make in life. Our mindset dictates our personality. In recent years, there has been a lot of focus on mindset within business, sports and education.
Mindset categories can include:
Abundance Mindset
Creative Mindset
Success Mindset
Scarcity Mindset
Fixed and Growth Mindsets
Fixed and growth mindset are the most common ones associated with leadership skills and the business world. The mindset studies come from the study by Carol Dweck, who wrote the popular book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In her work she states,
“I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves— in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?”
According to Dweck “the mindset can be developed”. This is something the field of psychology and neuroscience both agree upon as well. We know that what we've learned can be unlearned. A growth mindset is possible to develop and achieve.
Research in neuroscience and business is showing that improvement in mindsets from a fixed to growth mindset can lead to increased motivation and achievement.
Fixed mindsets of “that's just the way I think” to a growth approach of “I'm open to changing my view” is an example of how expanding one's thinking can develop possibilities of engagement.
Leadership Skills
It's almost without question that the ability to accept this approach is a key component to how to grow in leadership roles and influence for leaders in business. Which allows you to discover new potentials in yourself as well.
Leadership development emerges when we do the deep self-help work to hone this type of thinking.
What does this require?
A focus on continued learning rather than staying stuck on failure
Leaning into having difficult conversations to gather understanding versus avoiding
Positive thinking about challenges
Accepting change and having the confidence to adapt to the unknown
Trusting yourself
Choosing the areas to grow as a leader
There are numerous areas to choose from that you may consider improving upon as a leader, such as communication style, team building, motivating others, critical thinking, and strategic planning. Being skilled in these areas is obviously important.
Fixed Mindset
However, if the core foundation from where you operate, your mindset, is that of limitation, fear, self-judgment or scarcity, there will be profound limits to improvements in those areas.
Do you feel insecure in yourself as a leader?
Do you look for validation?
Are you afraid of asking questions?
Leadership Mindset
A leader can experience profound growth in themself once they choose to focus first and foremost on improving their mindset.
In fact, leaders often find that other areas such as communication, conflict resolution, and critical thinking improve as a by-product of improving or changing their leadership mindset towards growth.
The issue is that the mind gravitates to what is familiar. The familiar is safe.
If you do not naturally operate from the growth foundation of thinking, it can be challenging to change on your own. Because having a growth mindset requires a person to be ok with the unknown and move beyond what is familiar.
It requires doing deep work within oneself to be able to see things differently, to be more curious, and to be able to go from why to why not?
Next steps…
Are you ready to take move forward and achieve a higher level of progress in yourself? Mindset coaching is one of the best ways to get one-on-one coaching to make shifts quicker because it will deal specifically with what is blocking you from within. If you would like to test the waters, the 21-Day online Leadership Course is effective and designed to change the mindset.
Everyone has different internal issues that prevents them from getting into the right mindset and can inhibit a positive outlook. That is why group coaching is not always effective for the person who has a specific area in their mindset that holds them back.
Successful leaders
Leadership development means choosing to do the internal work on yourself and knowing that it will get you into the right mindset and improve how others see you but more importantly, how you see yourself. Recognize that your potential is limitless and ready keep expanding!
Jacqueline Connors, MA is a Psychotherapist and Mindset Coach who has worked in the private and public sector in leadership roles. She is trained in Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) Neurolinguistics Programming (NLP), Hypnosis, Brain-Based Coaching and Lean Management. She has a unique blend of skill sets derived from psychology, business and neuroscience and a deep understanding of how to apply the best from each discipline into the coaching experience.
