Skip to main content

Inner Work to become an Authentic Leader

It was 11:52 PM on a Thursday night. I am alone in a small room with a cot, a computer, and a phone waiting for it to ring. The building is unmarked and uninhabited except for myself taking on my first ever solo overnight shift at a short-term crisis counseling hotline. The phone rings and I let it for a few rounds. Finally, I take a deep breath to compose myself and answer. “National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, this is Aaron,” I say in the most compassionate and neutral voice I can muster in my panicked state.

Image from: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/media-resources/

I’ve heard the platitudes that our experiences shape who we are, but Bill George makes an interesting point that our experiences alone do not shape us. How we process our experiences and receive feedback about them is what can develop us into an authentic leader (Key Step Media, 2012). As a counselor for the suicide prevention hotline, I had plenty of experiences that still sit with me to this day. If it weren’t for the debriefs that I had after my calls I could not reflect on how I was able to show up for the caller and the impact that I truly had. I’ve had other experiences that profoundly shaped how I think and how I show up at work: good experiences like becoming the supervisor for a small call center, and terrible ones like being let go from my employer as a pandemic bubbled into a global crisis.

Throughout all of these experiences, I’ve had a small circle of trusted others that I would go to for support, to process my experiences, and glean the lessons from even the most devastating of experiences. My closest friends Jade and Victoria were there through it all, and are my closest confidants to this day. My spouse Ryan also shows up for me when I need most someone to process with. These days, as our lives become more chaotic, I set up weekly meetings with each of them where we catch up from the week before, look to the week ahead, and reflect on all that is happening in the world and in our lives. Even in my professional life weekly team meetings are deep, and we reflect on both our personal and or work lives.

While this may sound like good mental health, the effects of reflecting on my experiences benefit more than just my own wellbeing. Authentic leadership can be viewed as leadership that is deeply intrapersonal and interpersonal at the same time (Northouse, 2016). My experience as a crisis counselor provided me with plenty of opportunities to connect deeply with others, while my experience with debriefs and feedback loops give me a great deal of internal reflection or "inner work" as described by Bill George (Key Step Media, 2012). The benefits of authentic leadership are measurable and can create lasting change in teams and organizations. Lyubovnikova et. al (2017) found that authentic leadership behaviors resulted in a higher level of employee reflexivity which caused them to perform with a higher level of productivity and effectiveness. These outcomes were linked to self-regulatory processes found within authentic leadership situations where a leader's behaviors "become contagious among team members and manifest in team reflexivity," (Lyubovnikova, et al., 2017, p. 62). Developing authentic leadership requires critical life events viewed through the lens of positive psychological traits and showing up at work with self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency (Newhouse, 2016). The experience I've had throughout my life and even the ones I am going through now are helping me develop into a transformational leader that shows up authentically for my organizations and my team.


References

Key Step Media. (2012, November 1). Harvard's Bill George: Inner work for authentic leadership

Lyubovnikova, J., Legood, A., Turner, N., & Mamakouka, A. (2017). How authentic leadership influences team performance: The mediating role of team reflexivity. Journal of Business Ethics (141)1m 59-70.

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Sage Publishing.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I found the Standards in my Life

I had standards by which I lived my life before I could explicitly identify them. I found that not every choice I made brought me closer to the person I wanted to be. I make decisions every day that bring me joy, sadness, fulfillment, and yearning for more. In an effort to understand how I make these decisions, and to be more intentional, I recently started a journey to reflect on my own core values. I have made many moves in my life and I wanted to better understand how I can make decisions that align with my core values. To facilitate this introspection I asked myself the questions below. In reflecting on these questions I found patterns. Patterns of behaviors and ways of being that helped me understand how I have lived in and out of alignment with my core values. Now that I am aware of them, and have them written out, these are my standards for decision making. These are the ways of being that help ensure I am living the life I want to live. Questions I asked myself What am I doing ...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Role(s) in a Team

Teamwork is a common thread throughout life. Growing up with parents and a sibling, working at my first job at McDonald's, and my marriage and current household all provide me with an opportunity to practice teamwork. Most, if not all, of the engagements in my life involve interacting and cooperating with others, so this exploration into how teams form and are led is an interesting practice of reviewing literature and reflecting on how I engage in my day-to-date life. As a part of a team, I tend to take leadership roles quite naturally. Whetten & Cameron (2011) describe several roles of embers within a team: task-facilitating, relationship-building, and blocking roles. I believe that I have played each role at some point. I feel most at home when I play a task-facilitation role, but I also make time and space for relationship-building. Teamwork is all about getting individual contributors to work together toward a common goal, so ensuring that the relationships among team membe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Constraints on Creative Problem Solving

Creative problem-solving requires a great deal of flexibility, and acceptance of risk which can be difficult for businesses who are generally risk averse to embrace. Many constraints also exist in our individual thinking which limit our capacity to think and problem-solve creatively (Whetten & Cameron, 2016). In my own experience in the nonprofit and social service industries I have seen these constraints hold back otherwise successful individuals.  “Well, this is how we’ve always done it” I’m sure you’ve heard this common refrain from supervisors and teammates in the past. Generally, we hear this when someone questions an existing policy, procedure, or process. The inquiry is not personal, but this knee-jerk response is a clear indicator that the individuals are experiencing some conceptual blocks to creative problem solving. Complacency is a major impediment to thinking differently, in fact, complacency may mean that the people in question are not thinking at all. When we avo...
Post a Comment
Read more