When enough employees become a better version of themselves, you notice it in the organisational culture. Without anyone ordering it, people start treating each other with more respect.
As an employer, you want to create the conditions in which employees can be engaged. But over the last bit, the part that lies with the employee, you have little control. How someone deals with themselves and behaves in contact with others falls outside the organisation's influence. You can't say to an overworked or overstrained employee: "Come on, I've met all the conditions, now get to work with a bit more wisdom and motivation."
A shared language
You can, however, help people develop personal leadership. In training sessions, you can offer employees various tools and look at what each person needs to become a better version of themselves. That could be training in energy or time management, or a coaching programme to deal better with fear of failure or anger.
You can also offer organisation-wide training in concentration, giving feedback or mindfulness. Or you can organise voluntary information hours on topics such as workload and stress, staying fit and energetic, or nutrition. That raises awareness and helps you develop a shared language together, which makes it easier to discuss personal or team frictions.
Conscious incompetence
Personal leadership starts with awareness. Take a concentration training. There you learn, for example, that after an interruption it takes an average of around 23 minutes before you are back at your original task. Mark et al. Once you know that, an alarm bell goes off when you have made no progress after an hour of slogging away. You then know: if I keep looking at my phone, I'll never get into a flow. And then you can decide to do something about it.
Once you are aware of your own incompetence, conscious competence comes within reach. Such insights also make it easier to ask for support. A shared language helps. You can then say to your colleagues: "I'm off the radar for the next two hours, because I need to finish something."
Rising above yourself and the situation
Personal leadership is not only about how you deal with yourself, but also about how you deal with others. What happens, for example, when someone annoys you? Can you then look at yourself and think: why does this remark upset me so much? What does that say about my own challenges? What triggers you is often, in a milder form, your own challenge.
By rising above yourself and the situation for a moment at difficult moments, and recognising and naming unproductive reactions, the way you deal with yourself and others can change considerably. Personal leadership brings more awareness, relaxation and better functioning. Not only in private, but also at work.
Leadership development for better team performance
You don't just develop such a conscious attitude while working. To do that, you often have to get away from your working environment for a while, sometimes separately from your teammates. In training and coaching, you can discover which thought patterns and emotions unconsciously drive your behaviour. Those automatic reactions often arose in the past. Do they still help you now? If not, you can learn to develop different, more effective behaviour.
Such programmes take time and money, but can deliver a lot. Especially for managers. When they learn to act in a way that is good for themselves and their environment, everyone benefits. Gallup found that 70% of the differences in engagement between teams are linked to the manager. Gallup That is why leadership development is often the quickest way to improve team performance.
The right organisational culture
When enough employees become a better version of themselves, you see it reflected in the culture. People treat each other with more respect. They understand that you can look at the world through different lenses and can therefore experience the same situation very differently. They become more tolerant and inclusive. New employees adapt to that pleasant atmosphere without noticing.
Good energy like that also radiates outwards. Customers and suppliers feel it and like doing business with you. That is the strength of an organisation that invests in personal leadership: employees who perform better, work together more respectfully and dare to be more creative. And engagement pays off: the most engaged teams are 23% more profitable, 18% more productive in sales and have 81% less absenteeism than the least engaged teams. Gallup
Also read leadership? Make it personal! and do you believe in your own abilities?.
About this article: this piece is based on a blog by Guido Heezen of Effectory, from his series on the conditions for work engagement.
