Five questions to start asking yourself now
As we enter the final month of 2023 and start to look ahead to 2024 it can be a natural time for leaders to focus on development and ask themselves where do we want to go next?
Part of our leadership coaching work at humanKIND is helping leaders and executives define, develop, and implement their personalized leadership growth plans. Leadership is a core driver and success factor in creating personal balance, fulfillment, creating extraordinary employee & client experiences, and high-performance cultures at work, at home, and out in their communities.
In our coaching practice here are some of the questions that we hear leaders asking:
How can I create a personalize leadership growth plan that honours my personal values, experiences, and gets me excited?
Can I create a human-centered approach to leadership within the organization that I lead?
Is it possible to grow and develop and find balance between work, home, and the rest of my life?
How do I create a culture of authentic and inclusive leadership for all employees on our team?
Not only do we believe that designing a human-centered approach to leadership is possible, but we also believe that a human-centered approach to leadership provides powerful scaffolding that supports your leadership impact and is a core ingredient to creating and maintaining a more inclusive high-performance culture.
Leadership is relationships
Leadership is all about relationships: the relationship that you have with yourself (self-awareness) and the relationships you have with others to move towards a common goal (effectiveness). A human-centered approach to leadership aims to find the balance between who you are, how you show up, how you move forward, and what you want to accomplish.
When creating or refining a human-centered approach to leadership you want to create a framework for yourself and your organization that gives space to intentionally focus on five core areas: focusing on the here and now, tools & space that promote self-awareness, presence and reverence for the whole person, hyper-personalization, and intentional & measurable action.
Does you and the space where you lead have the desire to create a more people-first approach to leadership? If so, these five questions will help guide you forward.
1. What work are you currently doing to identify and address any personal and organizational blind spots that keep you stuck?
Leadership growth and organizational change always start from the same place: the here and now. Many organizations have the desire to help leaders grow and change but this growth can be short-circuited if you're not addressing the current personal and cultural norms & practices that show up every day right now.
What’s really going on inside for you right now? What's really going on inside of the organizations where you lead right now? Is your current personal mindset and organizational culture open to change or is your mindset and practices unconsciously stopping or blocking your attempts for growth?
One of the most important starting places for creating a human-centered approach to leadership is undertaking a current state analysis to help understand and bring to light any of the deep-rooted beliefs.
Personal beliefs: What are the written or unwritten rules that you live your life by? Where did those beliefs come from? Do you still actively believe in your own beliefs?
Organizational beliefs: What’s behind 'how we do things around here', the unwritten rules of your C-Suite team, and norms on how individuals get ahead in your organization?
Taking an honest and vulnerable look at the 'here and now' can be deeply uncomfortable work but it's necessary if you want to build your personal leadership practice on a firm foundation. Think of this step as your personal & organizational excavation work as you embark on your human-centered leadership journey.
2. What are you and your organization doing to help increase self-awareness and internal growth for your and those that you lead?
Self-awareness or emotional intelligence is one of the most important skills to help leaders develop. When you become more self-aware you start to see the connections between who you are and why you do what you do.
What tools, training, and focus does your organization provide to help team members better understand the motivations that underly their thoughts, habits, beliefs, and actions?
How are you building self-awareness into your leadership development journey? Are you creating the intentional space and tools so that both you and your team members can safely start to understand some of the personal blind spots or autopilot tendencies that may be holding them back?
A human-centered approach to leadership provides tools, time, and presence to help leaders see, know, and compassionately understand themselves on a deeper level.
3. How can you and your organization move towards whole-person development plans?
Leadership growth doesn't exist within a box. When moving towards a human-centered approach to leadership you need to look at work from a whole person perspective.
Accenture's 'Net Better Off' research from 2021 helped to quantify that ‘what matters most to your people works for your business’. Their research found that 64% of a person’s potential- defined as their ability to use their skills and strengths at work-- is influenced by whether or not they feel their work is leaving them 'better off' across these six fundamental human needs: Financial wellbeing, Emotional & Mental wellbeing, Relational wellbeing, Physical wellbeing, Purpose, and Future Employability.
We lie to ourselves and each other when we pretend that we can separate and isolate the different aspects that make up our lives. We also hold ourselves back and hamper our creativity, productivity, and well-being when we attempt to restrict bringing our entire lived experience into how we show up at work.
Do you prioritize time for individual presence and connection at home, at work, with your community? Does leadership development growth plan address and work with the full spectrum of what makes us human? Or does your leadership development focus primarily on career growth without acknowledging the depth, complexity, richness, and uniqueness that make up the full 'whole person' experience?
This can be an opportunity to open and redesign your career development plans to become whole-person development plans. Whole-person development plans are grounded in a reverence for all parts of you and the individuals that you work with. Part of whole-person development requires the time & space to create trusting relationships with yourself and with those around you.
A human-centered approach to leadership meets people where they are right now and invites all of them to the table.
4. What are you doing to drive hyper-personalized leadership development?
One of the biggest reasons why traditional leadership development programs don't achieve their desired results is that they can take a one-size-fits-all approach. Taking a one-size fits all approach can ignore positional differences, multi-generational differences, cultural context, systemic organizational challenges, current and past lived experiences, and much more.
How do your leadership development strategies and opportunities reflect your unique needs? This is a space where it is important to be extremely selfish and focused on who you are and where you want to develop. This same space needs to be extended to those that you lead. Do the individuals that you have leadership influence with have a set of personal leadership goals and metrics that honour their unique personhood, experience, and needs?
Part of a human-centered leadership journey includes working on yourself and with your team members to co-create highly personalized, whole-person development plans that include leadership dashboards to measure individual and organizational leadership goals and metrics.
Human-centered leadership is nuanced, contextual, and hyper-personalized. A human-centered leadership development journey prioritizes opportunities for presence, connection, and a hyper-personalized approach.
5. How do you promote and encourage failing?
Leadership growth needs to be grounded in self-awareness, presence, connection, and action. You don't grow without stumbling forward. The action part of this equation can feel great, and it can also be messy, uncomfortable, vulnerable, and can feel unsafe if you're not used to experiencing change. Many individuals have a desire for growth but also hold an unrealistic belief that growth comes without change. This is where many of us get stuck.
How does your organization create a psychologically safe container for all of your people to fail forward? How do you create this safe container for yourself? Do you recognize and celebrate failed attempts? Do you reward team members who try new ways of being or doing but may miss the mark? Have you created intentional spaces within your culture to talk about the messy parts of growing forward? Does that voice in your head criticize yourself for ‘failed’ attempts or do you encourage yourself for trying new approaches to growth?
A human-centered leadership development journey is focused on self-awareness and is grounded in action. A human-centered leadership approach creates space for self-reflection and balances this space for team members to fail and grow forward.
In the months ahead we will continue the conversation around human-centered leadership. We'll share strategies, tools, learning, and insights that we're experimenting with here at humanKIND and with our leadership and coaching clients.
As you work to build a more inclusive human-centered leadership approach for yourself and for those your lead, I encourage you to start by giving yourself space to ask the big leadership questions as you start this year.
Who are you?
Who do you want to be?
What do you want to create?
When the answers to these personal questions align with your authentic and chosen values you create better human connections, strengthen your leadership impact, and you start to create a better future for us all.
Are you readY to CREATE personalized leadership growth plan?
At humanKIND, our specialized leadership coaching services for engaged leaders, executives, founders, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and thought influencers are designed to co-create and sustain inclusive, thriving, and high-performance work and life outcomes. Invest in coaching today and unlock your true potential as a leader.
If you’re ready to explore a path forward, we would love to have an initial conversation to see if we’d be good partners for your growth.
Use the link below to schedule your free 15 minute discovery call.
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