Self-Leadership is Key – MBA Lecture Summary

In this article — effectively a summary of the lecture in our Digital MBA for Technology Leaders — Andrew Bryant, business coach and public speaker whose book on this subject is used in MBA programs worldwide, explains what self-leadership is, why you need it and how to develop it.

What is Self-Leadership?

Self-leadership is the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feelings and actions towards your objectives. For some, this comes naturally, while others have to train themselves in it.

The problem the latter group needs to solve first is the so-called, framing or the nature of an individual’s central belief system that’s been influenced by social and physical factors. Framing effectively influences the way we see the world and, therefore, affects our decision-making process.

So the first step to solve this is to step back from that frame and accept the fact that we have all been pre-programmed. Otherwise, you will continue being just a passenger on the bus of life, as Andrew put it in his lecture.

Are You Capable of Self-Leadership?

One of the ways to check that is to confirm the potential absence of self-leadership abilities.

How to recognize the absence of self-leadership?

If a person has tendencies for reactivity, randomness, blame and a victim mindset, then it’s safe to say that self-leadership voids.

Why is Self-Leadership Important?

A) To become the driver of that bus of life and, thus, take full control of your actions and reactions.

B) To avoid the aforementioned symptoms that indicate the acute or chronic absence of self-leadership abilities.

The maxim here is, therefore, that you can’t lead others unless you first lead yourself.

This brings us to our final and most important part of this lecture:

How to Develop Self-Leadership Skills?

To test the ability to self-lead, we first need to measure self-awareness, self-regulation and self-learning.

As you know, self-awareness is the tendency of an individual to focus and reflect on psychological processes, inner experiences and relationships with others.

Let’s do a quick psychometric test on you right now.

Psychometric Test of Self-Awareness

Now, choose a chess piece that best represents your professional (work) personality.

Let’s see what each piece means.

PAWN: Eight on each side, they move slowly towards the opposition and are likely to be sacrificed early in the game. If you are feeling powerless at work, you’d be a pawn.

ROOK: A risk-averse piece that doesn’t move early in the game. Audit or compliance and sometimes technology are in the rook category. It is a very powerful, but not necessarily a good position early in the game.

KNIGHT: This is a risk-embracing piece, an entrepreneur. Jumps forward, sideways, surprises the enemy. The problem is that, sometimes, knights get so far ahead of the other pieces that they lack the support.

BISHOP: A piece that cuts diagonally across the board. Always in a hurry, hates stand-up operating procedures and just wants to sell even before R&D develops a product or Operations come up with the delivery process. Bishop is also the arch-enemy of the rook.

QUEEN: In the original Indian game of chess, the queen was the vizier and wasn’t gender-specific. The queen can go forward, backwards and diagonally. In other words, she can go everywhere. However, she’s so busy looking after everybody else that she sometimes forgets to look after herself.

KING: If you chose the king, maybe you have delusions of grandeur and narcissistic tendencies because the king, whilst the most important piece on the board, requires the support of all other team members.

And now for the real kicker – it doesn’t matter which piece you chose. This was a setup because you’ve been framed.

The real lesson here is to have a high level of self-awareness to step back from stereotypes and play all the pieces.

Building a high level of self-awareness is critical for the next fundamental – self-learning.

What is Self-Learning?

Self-learning is the process by which individuals take the initiative in diagnosing their learning needs, goals, resources and outcomes.

Our students, for instance, have already demonstrated an intention for self-learning simply by enrolling and following the lectures. That’s why you need to apply self-leadership to all the things that you learn here or anywhere else, adjust your behaviour and move forward.

In chess, for example, you will often find yourself cornered and locked up. But a self-leading mindset perceives such a situation differently simply because it is aware that when we feel stuck, there’s an opportunity lying in there somewhere. So if you just stick for a moment and take a good look at the board, you’ll find an opportunity to not just get out of the trap but to turn the game around. In other words, your self-learning tendencies will start looking for options.

From those options, we move into self-regulating mode, otherwise known as, self-management.

A self-regulatory process modulates attention, emotion and behaviour for a given situation/stimulus with the underlying purpose of pursuing a goal. Self-regulation, therefore, allows us to find the opportunities.

In other words, with self-regulation, we can take action when opportunities arise.

There are various things we can do to track our self-regulation but one of the most effective is to set up our work environment to trigger us into our best state to do the work that we need to do. It can be time management, focus or better organisation.  

The Big Picture

The big picture here is to set an intention to see the frames (options) to set your own frame (opportunity).

You see, at the C-level, you are not taking orders anymore or acting reactive. Instead, you are proactive, strategic and part of the senior leadership team (SLT) – the single most important team in every organisation.

So you must articulate your intentions, ideas and insights. In other words, you must use self-leadership to convert those into executive presence; the ability to project gravitas, confidence and poise under pressure. When you do that, you develop the so-called, influence capital.

Conclusion

Self-leadership is the foundation. It leads to options and opportunities. And it has only three principles:

1. Always look for options and opportunities.
2. Be self-aware to assess the nature of the frame you’re operating from.
3. Learn to take and process feedback and make necessary adjustments.

And here is a good quote you should remember:

“Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one’s own way.”

Dr. Victor Frankl

Self-leadership is that inner resilience. It is the flexibility to find the course by choosing your frame rather than accepting the frames of your birth and upbringing.

Remember, it doesn’t matter what has happened in the past because when you change your intention, you change your future.