3 Tips to Discovering Your Authentic Leadership Voice
Everyone has an authentic leadership voice. You may have just used it 5 minutes ago with your co-workers, your spouse or even your kids! Maybe you just encouraged your co-worker, or you had a tough conversation with your spouse but they actually listened and you came to a compromise, or maybe you were pushing your kids to do something they didn’t want to do and you launched a granade at them and now you’re starting to see the damage it caused. In any of those scenarios, your authentic leadership voice was responding.
These scenarios and countless others reveal our authentic leadership voice whether we like it or not. Our natural personality does play a role and our voice can be viewed as a strength to some and a weakness to others.
If you truly want to add value to those you lead then do these 3 things to discover your authentic leadership voice:
1. Ask those you lead what it’s like to be on the other side of your voice.
I know this is scary, but in order for you to truly discover your authentic leadership voice you need to take the rose colored glasses off. You need to hear what other’s experience on the other side of your voice. You need to ask several people this question so you can get some common threads or themes to how other’s experience your authentic leadership voice.
2. Ask yourself, how do I process information and how do I share it?
Are you an internal processor who keeps everything in your head until you are absolutely certain it’s the right time to share? Or are you an external processor verbally expressing everything that’s inside your head to those you lead? Processing and sharing matter. Those you lead need to know how you process and share, but more importantly, you as the leader need to understand and know how those you lead process and share information.
3. What are the tendencies that shape my behavior?
In the book: 5 Voices, How to Communicate Effectively With Everyone You Lead, by Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram (I highly recommend this book! Click here to purchase on Amazon), the author’s tell us that “we all have tendencies, whether we are aware of them or not [and that these] tendencies create patterns of behavior that shape our actions [and that] our actions always have consequences in every reality of our lives – self, family, team, organization, and community.”
Our tendencies are so familiar to us that we don’t even realize we are doing them, and yet they have so much influence and they shape our reality.
Because I always wanted to belong, my tendency is to include everyone. Even when my kids were little, when our oldest daughter had a friend over to play, I made them play with the little sisters because of my tendency to including everyone. So you can imagine, when our daughter got older and I was still operating out of my tendency, that there was some pushback to making her play with the little sisters!
Do the Work to Develop Your Authentic Leadership Voice
It’s so easy to lead people that think and act like we do isn’t it? But that’s not reality, because we all think and act differently, even in our own families. If you really want to understand and develop your authentic leadership voice, take the feedback from the first tip and work to understand how you process and share information from the second tip and identify those tendencies that are shaping your behavior in the third tip. Then develop those areas that keep you from communicating effectively.
Recent Comments