Self Leadership and Self Awareness

Self Leadership

• Leadership involves a mutually influential relationship between leaders and employees at all levels
• It aims to achieve shared goals and provide added value to people
• Limbic Brain deals with emotions
• Reptilian Brain deals with instinct
• Neocortex deals with rational thinking
• Team, self, organizational and strategic leadership are all aspects of leadership

Self Awareness

• Know yourself by being aware of your own emotions
• Requires introspection and the ability to name and recognize emotions
• Emotional self-awareness allows recognition and expression of one’s experience
• Emotions represent an inner response to environmental interaction, including anger, joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and surprise
• Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions identifies 8 basic emotions organized by physiological purpose:
  • Survival
  • Adaptation
  • Empathy
  • Organizations
  • Motivation
  • Social communication
• Risky attitudes in managing emotions include:
  • Unawareness
  • Neglecting
  • Bad management
• Emotions can be expressed through mimicry, vocalization, gestures, and posture
• Self-regulation and management of actions are vital
• Self development enhances one's abilities and actions

Johary Window

• The open area, known to self and others, includes attitudes, behavior, motivation, values, and lifestyle
• The blind area, known to others but not self, includes unrealized or misperceived aspects
• Feedback helps realize these unknown aspects
• The hidden area, known to self but not others, holds unconscious information
• Accessing this area reveals richness and complexity
• The unknown area is not known to self or others unless disclosed
• It holds fears, sensitivities, and manipulative intentions
• Feedback and disclosure expand the open area and access potentials of the unknown

Emotional Intelligence

• This is the ability to recognize feelings and motivate oneself and others in social relationships
• Emotional intelligence is complementary to general intelligence
• It can be developed and improved throughout life
• Four dimensions:
  • Self-awareness
  • Self-management
  • Social awareness
  • Relationship management
• Two macro-areas:
  • Personal competence/intra-personal intelligence
  • Social competence/relationships management
• Goleman developed a model of this

Empathy and Mirror Neurons

• Specific neuronal structures activate by tuning into others
• They allow for sensory and emotional mirroring
• In close communication, it creates intimate contact and empathy

Team Leadership

• This leadership influences individual or group activities to achieve goals

Great Man Theory

• This theory states that leaders are born, not made
• Leadership qualities were considered intrinsic and unteachable
• Great leaders possess innate human characteristics predisposing them to greatness
• Leadership was reserved for males, especially in the military

Trait Theory of Leadership

• Scholars turned to identifying general qualities or traits present in leaders
• Studies identified personality traits differentiating leaders from followers, as reported by Stogdill (1948) and Mann (1959)
• Effective leaders have particular personality qualities and behavioral traits
• Some people are more naturally gifted leaders
• The theory doesn't consider situational factors, and not all with these traits are great leaders

Behavioral Theory of Leadership

• Leadership success depends on observing leaders' actions
• Specific behaviors differentiate leaders from non-leaders
• Leaders can develop based on learnable behavior
• Observing a leader's behavior is the best indicator of leadership success
• Observable behavior patterns classify as ‘leadership styles' such as task-oriented, club, people-oriented, dictatorial or status-quo leaders

Leadership Styles

• Authoritarian (or autocratic):
  • Acts despotically and doesn't give confidence or accept advice
  • Makes every decision without delegating, establishing cold, formal relationships
  • Functions as a controller defending its own power
  • Can result in aggression and apathy, or lead to informal power searches within the group
• Democratic:
  • Seeks collaboration and accepts criticism
  • Confidentially communicates and encourages employees to share ideas
  • Serves as a consultant recognizing merits and sanctioning punishments
  • Can result in maximum cooperation and minimum aggression
• Permissive Leader:
  • Is indifferent and disinterested in the group
  • Doesn’t exert any stimulus action or help/cooperate
  • Has a purely institutional role and exercises little influence
  • Can result in a loosely cohesive and apathetic group

Contingency Theories

• Fiedler’s Contingency Theory states there is not one best leadership style; the most effective aligns with the situation
• The right leader must be chosen based on skills and situation requirements
• Leaders first understand natural leadership style to best match situations
• Leadership depends on leadership style and the degree of situational control/influence
• Relationship-oriented leaders excel at building relationships and resolving conflict
• Task-oriented leaders excel at organizing projects and teams

Situational Leadership

• This is selling, telling, participating, and delegating
• A framework analyzes leader-follower relationships based on follower maturity
• Relational and task behavior support follower needs and development
• A style is more appropriate when it suits the situation and follower maturity
• The style balances direction (task-oriented) and support (people-oriented) approaches
• Leader behavior should be chosen according to the employee's work and psychological maturity
• Effectiveness stems from ability and willingness to take responsibility
• LOW S 1 -DIRECTING: The leader provides clear and specific directives when people are unable to take responsibility
• MEDIUM -LOW S 2 -COACHING: The leader provides guidance and support with the aim of consolidating the good availability of employees
• MEDIUM -HIGH S 3 -SUPPORTING: The leader encourages and enhances the employee's skills
• HIGH S 4 -DELEGATING: The leader trusts capable and responsible (autonomous) employees

Transactional vs. Transformational Leadership

• TRANSACTIONAL LEADERS: Manage existing situations in a traditional way ensuring performance/commitment, they clarify expectations
  • CONTINGENT REWARD: Uses positive/negative reinforcement to direct collaborators, aiming for expected outcomes, not employee development
  • MANAGEMENT BY EXCEPTION: Avoids giving directions; intervenes only with corrective actions
• TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS: Change events and actions, they aim at follower transformation
  • They involve employees in personal/organizational growth
  • Motivate employees towards high goals, encouraging experimentation
  • Stimulate the group with new challenges
  • Stimulate autonomous & creative thinking
  • They transform others, activating a new mindset and their potential

Attributes of Transformational Leadership

• Idealized Influence/gain trust: leaders arouse pride/confidence and build emotional bonds with employees
• Inspirational Motivation: leaders empower work, outline perspectives and use optimistic attitudes
• Intellectual Stimulation: leaders stimulate innovation, challenge beliefs and encourage new ideas
• Individual Consideration: leaders facilitate growth through personalized mentorship and communication

Goleman Leadership

• Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee (2002) identified six emotional leadership styles with different effects, strengths, and weaknesses
  • Four styles promote harmony and positive outcomes: visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic
  • Two styles may create tension (commanding and pacesetting), best used in specific circumstances
  • Only the coaching style develops employees

Tuckman's Team and Group Development

• Forming Stage:
  • People get to know each other, strengths, weaknesses, quirks, goals etc
  • People avoid conflict and "play nice" to be accepted
• Storming Stage:
  • People feel safer, pushing boundaries, causing conflicts
  • Clashes occur due to differing personalities and working styles
• Norming Stage:
  • Team agrees on plans and timelines, assigning roles based on skill
  • Team members accept weaknesses and develop trust
• Performing Stage:
  • Team is stable, goals clear and processes have been developed
  • Tasks get done with minimal supervision and conflict
  • People are motivated and conflicts are no longer threatening
  • A high-performing team emerges at this stage meeting all needs
• Mourning or adjourning:
  • Bruce Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added a fifth stage: adjourning/mourning in 1977
  • It is about wrapping up the task and team breaking up
• At the Forming stage: A leader helps define objectives, roles, and responsibilities while also being directive
• At the Storming stage: The leader is accessible, manages conflict professionally, offers coaching as needed, and ensures clear responsibilities
• At the Norming stage: The leader facilitates decision-making and uses coaching approach rather than directives
• At the Performing stage: The leader is autonomous and delegates while developing team members and maintaining a visioning role

Vroom-Yetton Decision Model

• Use a decision tree approach to assess the situations that influence a leader's decision:
  • Nature of the Task: Understand the task's structure to determine the needed team input
  • Degree of Conflict Among Followers: If conflict is expected, use a collaborative approach
  • Followers' Acceptance of Decisions: Assess how important acceptance is when team members disagree
  • Team’s Capability and Shared Goals: Evaluate organizational goals and the team's expertise to contribute

The Five Decision-Making Processes (identified by Vroom and Yetton)

• These processes fit decision-making styles to the situation:

1. Autocratic (A1)- make the decision alone, without any input from the team. Best when the leader has sufficient information
2. Autocratic (A2)- The leader collects information from the team but retains the authority to make their own final decision
3. Consultative (C1)- the leader informs the team and collects individual opinions, but makes their own decision valuing the groups input
4. Consultative (C2)- leader brings the team together and has a discussion, although maintains the authority to make the decision
5. Collaborative (G2)- both the leader and the team work together to find a decision

• Effective decision-making hinges on complexity, team conflict, and commitment
• A consultative or collaborative approach builds ownership and commitment

Growing and Developing the Follower

• EMPOWERING: Provide tools, resources, and an environment to build ability & effectiveness for individual goals

• Requires trust, information, and communication, which then fosters innovative ideas

• Empowerment can increase workers confidence, creating happier workers and increased productivity:

  • Encourage open sharing of ideas and provide learning opportunities by clear goals and expectations
  • Recognize and reward good performance: give employees authority
  • Create a friendly environment: encourage teamwork and respect

• When employees feel trusted, they are more motivated to take ownership, have increased satisfaction and improved productivity, they also improve decision making skills themselves

• To meet these expectations:

  • Meet the basic employee needs
  • Improve self-efficacy
  • Providing new challenges and training

• There is a direct correlation between a follower's output and the leader's expectations and trust (Pygmalion effect)

Leadership

• To grow and empower the employee, know the organizational reality, have an interested in their developing, know their strengths and how to assign to foster development, and how to give feedback
• The operating principles to assigning goals is the same to self-development
• Assigning Objectives involves:
  • Knowing how to assess the employees
  • Mastering the context within which it can be achieved
  • Creating tested conditions
• Goals become effective when:
  • There is trust
  • The goal is desirable
  • Achieving the goal provides individual growth
  • The person has the skills to reach goal
• This involves:
  • Interviewing
  • Reviewing
  • Evaluating

Feedback

• this helps achieve a goal and encourages action
• It involves defining the content, communicating it well and having healthy relationship management as a result
• Pay Attention to:
  • Being clear and specific is the meaningful and timely thing to do
  • Describing not evaluating -Involves describing the situation and behaviour, then expressing your truth
  • Describe the situation and behaviour
  • Explain the impact
  • Help clarify understanding
  • Agree on actions
  • Confirm and end
• Involves developing follower's self-efficacy
  • Through mastery, vicarious experience, persuasion and emotional management

Stress Management

• This is about how on deals with thoughts under pressure
• Problem Focused: involves thinking about ways to fix the problem
• Emotion Focused: creates mental health around stress
• Ineffective coping skills involve alcohol or drug abuse
• However effective ones involve self-awareness, change in perspective, support and relaxation
• Relaxation should be performed by being aware of the body through breathing, meditation and visualization
• Mindfulness is about being in mind
• Meditation is a mind-healing strategy, which we change neural strength
• Motivation which derives from latin, can be two types:
  • Internal: enjoying the process that is undertaken
  • External: wanting to receive the final result

Motivation

• This is often conscious and result in great outcomes
• One must understand why and love what they do, find achievements and wants to change

Goal Setting

• Is used to understanding work motivation and performance (Locke)
• Achieved through pre defined paths and defined as short, mid and long
• Should include strategies like being SMART
• Very specific goals with more motivation can create more adaption
• Perfectionism, motivation, satisfaction, direction are all the benefits
• With goal setting, one can structure to reach one's final destination

Self Efficacy

• this is believing in one's own skills to produce behaviours
• People with low self efficacy underestimate things
• However people with high self efficacy are more resilient with high aspiration and problem solving
• To improve self efficacy involves experiences and seeing others succeed. Then improve emotions

Empathy and Identity

• Empathy involves relating to someone by adjusting and tuning to their needs, in the best understanding
• Identification, rationalization, conformity, self-esteem are all aspects of social identity theories

The Many Theories

• All describe the relation dynamics, such as by transformational leadership
• They must fit in the anthropological frame of reference
• A mission and vision which should be goal defined can benefit effective actions and inform any relationships

Mission and Vision

• Mission drives leaders
• The CAL loop guides leaders in the aims of the mission. By disciplined execution, leaders can aim to guide teams in pursuit of objectives of leadership
• Visions shape organizations and remain relevant
• A well described vision is needed to direct leadership, and unit a group

LORENZ’S STRANGE ATTRACTOR

• Rooted in chaos, is a metaphor for collective action that provides a more unpredictable element as a whole.
• It calls for leaders to navigate volatility with decentralized and proactive decisions, while underscoring the importance of embracement

COMMUNICATION

• Complicated systems involve multi systems, whereas complex has dynamic behaviours from interactions
• Volatility calls for decentralized decisions. This includes holistic thinking with ready means to change strategies

COMPLEX LOGIC

• Statistics have power, whereas complicated systems mean there can be many elements
• On the other hand, there can be many elements that are nonlinear
• Complex Adaptive involve human balance all relating to strong leadership

WHAT IS STRATEGIC

• It all relates to the direction of the war and the success related, all with a high value at stake and ample domain
• With coherent decisions
• All relates to an individual's mind in handling simple solutions

Mind Sets

• There are representive and wish and cost frameworks, all heavily infulenced on certain aspects
• And we must know their biases and be self aware

Strategic Thinking

• All in the name of positive thinking and helping with any negative feedback

Capabilities

• The digital dimension has exponentially helped with multi communications
• Also enabling decisions and knowledge

Bayesian Logic

• A more accurate probability is to use artifical intelligence that accounts for multiple variables
• Then judgments will be higher, and people from broadened minds could better help others

Framework: CAL LOOP

• Then the team starts reassessing themselves on their own performances regarding mission and strategies

Implementation

• With all phases now running simultaneously, communication, divergent convergion are necessary with this leadership process
• Strategic awareness is necessary and adaptation between people

CPSM

• Has a matrix of guidelines to give the team what it needs
• Serves the team well and is practical to be used in challenging environments
• Cybernetics also points in this direction. An influence system of inputs bearing on selected influence is coherent now
• Change that involves coherency is helpful

Hominds

• Began as scavengers, and evolved to hunting-gathering due to needs in their environment
• Then created hierarchical relationships in the basic social entities of small groups/male groups
• A group relationship shift, then has emphasis on behaviours and dynamics, resulting a relationship that humans pursue
• How this effects humans needs to be investigated with the study of ethics relating what humans share

Group Life

• Is important for the survival of humans, as they are vulnerable
• So this has to be a catalyst
• And a means of managing people ethics
• Forcing an ethical climate and knowing pre-war history which helps with future management

Strategic Management

• Needed better intelligence with the world war and how human was shaped (simple!)
• So people lived in smaller communities
• There was less ill, accidents and it was overall different now
• As nothing and everything was different, brains were still the same
• This relates to limited memory function or can cope with variables
• There is less mind and broading trends

Broad

• Therefore self knownity is a limited factor with big miscalculations
• Thus influences others

Ethics

• Critical ethical awareness will get to needed effects
• This involves big picture thinking and how this can be useful for leaders to learn all these things

Reassuring and Knowing

• To make decisions without any big conflicts
• Then this will be better than any analysis made
• A few important things are technology and information
• Now it's time to work on human wisdom

Then it all meets at Complex Adaptive Systems

• There now convergence of complex system studies which helps with leader application
• But it starts by just being good at being human/ethical