The motto of CRAFT Leadership: Sharpen the REAL LEADER in you by mobilising the 5 CRAFT Leadership qualities. When I came up with this motto, I thought of two things. First, it is based on my experience of working with leaders and executives. I have seen in almost every case that leaders tend to lose themselves, their REAL SELF, either partly or fully in the job of being a leader, especially when they have been leaders for quite a while. Their position and title can easily become their identity. It is not deliberate or sudden. No one wants this. Sometimes they let their surroundings push them into this trap, for example when their employees can see them and communicate with them only as their CEO without any real human connection or when their key stakeholders/shareholders see them and communicate with them only through their commission to comply with the short-term mandate, i.e., deliver quarterly results. It happens gradually and unnoticed, no matter how smart they are. It becomes their everyday normal. That is why it is important to build your leadership on solid ground and learn about what can happen when you stop monitoring yourself: you get misaligned and derailed.
In today’s business world, with all the disruptions and noise, it is pretty easy to get lost, clouded, and misaligned without any conscious intention. In fierce competition, it is also easy to become ‘positional’. Today, everything is about how you position yourself. I once saw a picture in which children were standing in a row and looking over a banister to see the view and what was happening on the other side. The smallest child who, to be able to see at all, stood on the middle section of the banister while the others were standing on the ground. As a result, she became the ‘tallest’ child with the best view. This picture was speaking about business intelligence. It said that success was not about size, but rather about positioning. While I really liked this image and the message it conveyed at that time, later on, I realised that there is a trap; when you lose connection to your real self, your positioning becomes not only your reality but your identity as well. “When you try to be more than you are, you end up being much less than you could be”.
I’m not saying that being task- and results-oriented and positioning yourself is wrong; I’m simply saying that it becomes wrong when they become the only determining and controlling factor in your leadership. Today, there is a greater risk for leaders to disconnect and lose their REAL SELF on the road. Nevertheless, self-aligned, self -connected, authentic leaders have greater influence and power based on and built from the inside out. The second meaning behind my motto is related to the word ‘sharpen’. Leadership is a process, a journey, which requires not only continual effort but also intentionality in developing yourself, constantly checking your REAL SELF and refining and adjusting it in your leadership. Leaders need more learning, more reflection, and more checking than their employees, because the impact of their actions and words is far greater than their people’s.
To sharpen your knowledge of yourself as a leader is to hone how you should be and how others perceive you; this is what self-awareness means. There is evidence that self-aware leaders can deliver better financial performance; self-awareness can actually lead to more profitable companies.
“When it comes to self-awareness Dr. Tasha Eurich discovered something disturbing: there is an inverse relationship between power and self-awareness. This means that the more senior you become in your organisation, the less self-aware you tend to be. This is exactly why it’s so crucial for leaders to practice self-awareness”. The question is where you should look to establish your identity as a leader. At your public image? At your accomplishments? At your recognition? Or do you get it from your internal rocks like your values, your driving force, your passions, your moral compass?
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