Has leadership come to you by your own choice or it is a matter of your position in your organisation? Whatever it may be, there is certainly a choice to hold on to it and if the reason is later, you might want to stop and reflect, Are you a Leader or a Manager?

Marshall Goldsmith beautifully defines leadership as, “Leadership is not what you say, it’s about what people hear!” It’s so important how people see you no matter what you do from your side. So if you are trying hard to appear like a Leader, its time for you to re-think about your approach.

Asking yourself these questions to yourself:

• Is Leadership an essential part of the job or that’s your job?
• Do you even want to be a leader?
• Are you a leader because of your high performance in cracking clients or because people around you see you as an inspiration and look up to you?
• Are you truly leading in all areas of your leadership?
• Do you have any interest in looking at your team’s growth or is it about your own success?

Well it might be a natural progression for you to reach where you have reached however the actual part of the journey starts when you have done everything you knew and your position demand’s you to walk the unknown path, which is the path of Authentic Leadership, the next level of Leadership.

Next Level of leadership is “Nothing about you, but still all about you” It’s that curriculum that you can’t download or read to become the next level leader.

The Next Level Leadership requires you to go through the inner journey to learn from reflections and ask yourself some tough but inevitable questions.

Authentic Leadership is about being same with your team members as you are with your children, your parents and your friends. And an Authentic leader doesn’t have to make any effort to “show” anything as he/she practices what they preach and hence the team perceives exactly the way it is.

It is simply being true to yourself as a leader at the stage of your life when you know your move impacts several people. It’s about realising how some of your habits are actually causing disappointments around you sub-consciously.

 Ready for a test?

If you wish to get a hint of your impact on your surroundings try these questions with mix of some of the new people in the organisation, your children, your life partner, some of the existing team members, some of your bosses and peers.

• What is one thing I am not doing right as a leader?
• What does inspire you in a leader and how am I doing on that trait on the scale of 0 to 10 (0= Poor, 10=Extremely well)?
• What is one habit, if changed can make me a better leader?

Try to have at least 6-7 people mix of above given category and see what comes out. Before you go to people, ask these questions to yourself and have fun to get responses.

The most important trait of an authentic leader is to be courageous to ask for feedback from anyone around and to be Humble to say “Thank you” post receiving the feedback – (Inspired by Marshall Goldsmith) Implications

The way globalization is changing the paradigm of working conditions; it is becoming more and more important for leaders to invest in themselves to be able to stay relevant in their leadership roles.

To understand this deeper let’s look at some of the values of new work places, which is consisting of gen Y’s and Z’s.

• These generations believes in what you say however if you do not preach what you teach they are very open to reject you as a leader (at least in their minds).
• Generation Z’s specially are very high on social and personal values and that’s the expectation from their environment too.
• A high-risk taker less worried about career than having a conducive, creative environment which stimulates their intellect, (This is the need of these generations).
• By rejecting hierarchy and “boss” culture they smoothly make their way into innovation, creativity and success making the workplaces to be more and more demanding specially for a leader.
• The need to be solution focused, contributing something large to learn at the rate at which the website opens is the pace of new workplaces.

For the leaders to be able to survive as leader and not manager in the new workplaces, it is important that they ask themselves whether they are interested to be upgrade to next version of Leadership. That’s really the first step towards Authentic Leadership. Rest all is honestly not working.

 “Leadership happens outside your cubicle, within the team, with people.”

 Possible solutions

• As hinted above the only way for new leadership is to be Authentic, which really simply means investing on upgrading the quality of you as a leader.

Robert J Thomas very aptly mentions in his book “Crucibles of Leadership” about the journey of Authentic leadership starts with having a Personal Learning Strategy, it’s the path to expert performance and shape to fit the reality of contemporary business and to its diversity of individual attributes and aspirations. He say’s your Personal Learning Strategy can’t be a checklist of menu items. Rather it needs to be reflected, owned and enacted by an individual driven by his or her personal vision, tailored to his or her learning style, aimed to extract insight from the broadest possible range of experiences and dedicate to achieving meaningful results.

“Inspiring is not an intentional act, Inspiration happens when you are doing the right things for yourself”.

• Today lot of leaders might be aware of the effective habits however isn’t it important to know what are the bad habits you might have which could be coming in the way of your development as a leader?

The 20 bad habits of ineffective leaders by Marshall Goldsmith acts as a self-assessment.

• Leadership is not about you but still it is about you

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” – Lao Tzu

If this article made you thinking, start with these questions:

Why do you lead? Or Why did you seek out the responsibility of being a leader?