In earlier instalments we demonstrated two of the key attributes of authentic leaders: they know themselves and they’re genuine. In other words, they know what’s important to them - they know their values - and their actions and behaviour are always aligned or congruent with those values.
We also discussed the negative consequences when the people who report to you perceive you as being inauthentic, how they begin to question themselves and whether they should follow you, and may even decide not to do so.
In this instalment we will tell you how to recognise when you’re out of tune with your core values and how to compose your own tune.
You may think that you have to know what being ‘in tune’ means before you can recognise when you’re out of tune, but in fact that isn’t always the case. Sometimes you just don’t feel right about whether or how you need to address a situation. Or when you’re aware that you could have handled a situation better, you continue to feel uneasy or uncomfortable about what you should have done or, indeed, did do.
Occasionally, this unease or discomfort can exist for weeks or months or even longer, perhaps not continually but the sensation keeps coming back. You can feel that something is ‘gnawing away at you’ and you can’t put your finger on the problem.
Questioning your leadership values
The values that are important to you have mainly evolved from the following:
(a) Your DNA: your personal mental make-up.
(b) Your upbringing: the way your parents or guardians brought you up.
(c) Your life experiences: critical events and how you interpret them.
Your values, especially your core values, underpin your approach to leadership because they:
(a) Have a significant bearing on what you do and how you behave. For example, if you value being trusted and trust people to get on with their work, you’re likely to give them more autonomy. But if you believe that people can’t be trusted, no doubt you check up on and monitor them closely.
(b) Guide how you evaluate people and events. For example, you’re more likely to get on well with people who have the same or similar values as you. You may also react strongly towards people who behave in ways that conflict with or undermine your core values.
Like most people, you may well spend little time thinking about what’s important to you. Invest time in clarifying your values, because when you’re clear about them, you can use them.
(a) To establish main points when making decisions about how you lead and manage people.
(b) To set standards for many aspects of work for yourself and the people who report to you.
(c) To resolve dilemmas about how to handle difficult situations and people.
(d) To ensure that you act fairly and consistently in working with people who report to.
Compose your own leadership tune
Let us now try to discover a few techniques to clarify your values and communicate them to your work colleagues. Investing time in clarifying your values is equivalent to you composing your leadership tune, because being clear about your values and behaving in ways that are in accord with and promote them enables you to be ‘in tune’ with yourself.
When you’re ‘on song’ in this way, your staff recognise that you’re being authentic: they see that you know your core values and are behaving in ways that fit with them.
Being an authentic leader requires you to show a genuine interest in other people, as well as being true to yourself by behaving in accord with your values. You can’t be authentic by focusing on what’s important to you while ignoring the needs and values of other people.
Work out what’s important to you
We have asked you to invest time in getting to know yourself. Take time now to start knowing yourself better by completing the following exercise on clarifying your values:
• What’s important to me about being a leader and how I lead people?
• What are my values, especially my core values?
• What’s important to me about how I’m treated and how I treat others?
• What’s important to me about how people work together?
• What work topics and issues generate most energy, positive or negative, within me?
• What positive impact or difference do I want to make to my organisation andwork team?
• What would need to happen at work for me to have a real sense of fulfilment?
• What topics tend to grab my attention and/or what do I talk about a lot at work?
• In terms of what is right and wrong, what are my absolute standards?
• What mark do I want to leave on the organisation, and the people around my values?
Question your assumptions
You may assume that you always act in accord with your values, but unfortunately this may not always be the case. For example, you may value treating people with respect and not notice when talking to them about completing a task that you’re being curt, because you’re anxious and under pressure to hit a deadline.
Instead of simply assuming that you always behave in accord with your values, try the following:
• Question and challenge yourself about whether you always behave as you intend to behave.
• Notice how you behave in different situations - especially when you’re under pressure
You may also find yourself assuming that other people place the same importance, or equally value, on what’s important to you, or presuming that the way you prefer to work is the same for them. You may be right, but you may also be wrong! You need to find out how to involve members of your team in clarifying and agreeing the values and behaviours to guide how they work together.
Communicate your values
Whenever possible, use face-to-face communication to convey your values, and the associated behaviours, to the people who report to and work with you. You don’t literally have to do a song and dance act to share your values with your staff. Your words and actions do need to be aligned or congruent with your values for you to be authentic and help reinforce your intended message to your work colleagues.
Using face-to-face communication gets across your important values and the relevant behaviours far better than email or other written forms of communication because:
Face-to-face communication is a more effective means of influencing people than other forms of communication because you can see the effect you’re having on your colleagues and act accordingly, such as by expanding on or clarifying certain points.
You’re using both sight and hearing, and research indicates that people take in more information through their sight than through just hearing the words.
Harmonise with others
As the buck stops with you in the sense that you’re accountable for ensuring that your team achieve objectives and complete tasks to the right standard by the required deadline, you may think that you’ve the right to impose your values and behaviours on your staff.
As we explained in earlier instalments, generally people don’t respond well to being told what to do, especially when they feel they’re being treated disrespectfully or made to feel inferior. A simple way to cause people you work with to feel inferior or disrespected is to emphasise your values and ignore the values that are important to them.
Be careful to avoid promoting your values over the values of people you work with especially when the national culture of some of your work colleagues is significantly different to your own national culture.
To help you harmonise your values with a work colleague, perhaps a team member, peer or even your boss, have a meaningful dialogue with him as follows:
1. Approach your colleague and suggest that you explore what’s important to you both in how you work together, with the aim of better understanding each other and improving workflow and productivity.
2. Agree to produce separately a list of the values that are important to each of you and note what you expect of each other in working together. You may need to explain the importance of values by drawing on the content of the earlier section in this instalment.
3. Complete your lists before you next meet.
4. Take turns during your next meeting to share each of the values and the expectations that you have of each other. Look for similarities to reinforce how close you are to each other already, and explore differences and the ways they can be reconciled in order to agree how you’re going to work more effectively together in the future. Agree when and how you plan jointly to review how well you put the agreements into practice.
5. Conduct reviews using facts and evidence of how you’ve worked together - particularly emphasising successes - to build progressively on good practice and strengthen your relationship. Where evidence emerges that you could work better together, jointly suggest and agree how you’re going to make improvements.
(Lionel Wijesiri is a retired company director with over 35 years’ experience in senior business management. Presently he is a business consultant, freelance newspaper columnist and a writer. He could be contacted on [email protected])
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