Is Your Leadership on Autopilot?

Admit it, we train and educate ourselves extensively for our professions, but rarely do we put as much effort in the part that eventually matters most – our ability to lead and influence others! It’s like we put our leadership skill building on auto-pilot and just hope we end up at the correct destination!

Recently I have been doing trainings for various groups of professionals entering specific medical fields. These are highly technical professions requiring extensive training and graduate work. During one of the sessions, however, I got to thinking out loud about how much we intentionally train and educate ourselves for the technical parts of our careers but we just assume that our leadership skills will grow by default! Again, we leave this to chance and put our leadership development on autopilot! And if we view our own development that way, how about the people we lead? Do we just hope they will somehow get better at being leaders in their own right?

The problem is that according to leadership guru John Maxwell, no one gets good at anything by accident! We HAVE to be just as INTENTIONAL about our leadership skills as any of our technical skills. According to master executive coach, Christian Simpson, we progress this way. We start out as Unconsciously Incompetent (we just don't know we are not good leaders). We then move to Conscious Incompetence (we begin to understand our current leadership skills are insufficient). Hopefully we arrive at Conscious Competence (we begin to work on it and make improvements). The important thing to understand is that this process can repeat itself every time we take on a new role or job with increased responsibilities.

So what do we need to do? Borrowing from Kurt Lewin's change strategy, we need to be continually engaged in a process of:

• UnFreezing - getting out of our former leadership mode and moving to another
• Movement - adding to knowledge and skills to our leadership tool box
• ReFreezing - consolidating those behaviors and evaluating for effectiveness.
• Repeat

Again, none of this will happen unless you are constantly evaluating what are you doing right and what needs to improve.

If I can help you and the people you associate with Get Better, Be Ready and LEAD OUT LOUD, I would invite you to visit my website below and see if any of the training or coaching experiences I offer can provide an impact! Also, as a bonus, if you go to my Out Loud Strategies website (www.outloudinc.com) and enter your contact information, I will send you a FREE guide to establishing a mentoring initiative program in your organization! Such an initiative would be critical in order to add value to your organization!

Yours in Leadership,

Bill Faulkner

Co-Founder – Out Loud Strategies

Independent Coach, Speaker, and Trainer with the John Maxwell Team ^TM

Email = bill@outloudinc.com

Visit our website at: www.outloudinc.com

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