Leading Teams - Personal Leadership to Creating a Leadership Difference

Leading Teams - Personal Leadership to Creating a Leadership Difference

Advanced Training Course on Moderation/Facilitation Skills

2-6 December 2002, Lalitpur, Nepal

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Personal Mastery

Who Am I…? What Am I…?

You are more than you PAST

The past consists of everything that has happened to you; your upbringing, your schooling, your relationships, your training experience – practically each day of your past life. It is something fixed. Once it has happened, it remains permanently etched in you.

Your past clarifies who you are. From your past you can trace the formation of your beliefs and values that now give direction to your life. From the past, you can identify the experiences that have conditioned and still influence your present behavior. From your past, you can speak of your personal achievements as well as your failures.

However, to say that you are only your past is to limit yourself, since you are also defined by who you are at present and what more you can become in the future. You are not only on your past; but your past is definitely an important and significant part of you.

You are more than ROLES and FUNCTIONS

Your roles and functions define your present significant relationships and social interactions. They also represent the range of what you are able to do with reference to certain roles. Being a teacher is an example of a role with certain social and professional expectations – to be patient with children, to mold the young kids to serve as models in the community, to be up-to-date on current events and new technology, etc. Roles and functions can likewise be considered your area for action or contribution, areas where you can feel most useful and productive. But no matter how numerous your roles and functions are, they are still not the sum-total of who/what you are. They are but meaningful factors to your personality.

You are more than you TRAITS

Traits are certain qualities and descriptions about you – you could say they are your “adjectives”, e.g., kind, considerate, dedicated, helpful, impatient, impulsive, insensitive, etc. They serve to distinguish you from others. Two people can have the same traits/adjectives but still be totally different from each other. What distinguishes your brand of dedication, kindness, friendliness, etc. is the manner in which you put these into action. Your brand of friendliness is different from mine. Your specific acts of friendliness have a unique flavor which cannot be described by words, but which is felt and responded to differently from another person’s act of friendliness. It feels good when you hear talk about your positive traits; you are more than your traits. You are rich in potentialities and possibilities waiting to be actualized. To equate yourself with only your present traits is to cease affirming yourself as a person with other potentials. To cease affirming your potentials is to cease to grow.

You are a MYSTERY in the process of becoming…

You are not any of these things that clarify, define or describe you (traits, past, attitude, etc.). They are undoubtedly part of your total self, and give you a sense of self-worth. Even if we were to put them all together, they could still not completely describe your full humanness – because perhaps it cannot really be defined- it is not definable. It means that you are still open to a host of possibilities in the present and in the future. To accept this means to accept the fact that you are a mystery, i.e., the more you know and understand about who you really are, the more there is to know and understand. You are not a static individual, definable and limited like a piece of wood, but rather you are a dynamic process of becoming…

One of the most important life goals is to nurture oneself and the center of aliveness, origination and meaning. Each of us has to act responsibly towards his own becoming, and not to expect it to be done as if it were somebody else’s responsibility.

Becoming is the very nature of aliveness. As persons, we are alive only in some moments of fresh awakening, of discovering ourselves. We are alive when we care, when we are sensible engaged in what is happening, not cautious about life but interested in nurturing life.

We are also alive when we feel. Victor Frank observed that in concentration camps, when a person has lost touch with how he actually feels about events and substitutes what other people tell him to feel, when his capacity to feel is eroded, when he loses his sense of being needed by some loved one, he quickly disintegrates as a person and eventually – dies.

We rot away when nothing happens with our person and when we are no longer enthusiastically engaged in life (work, family, friends, community).

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for and ask me what is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of the person. The better answer he has, the more a person he is – I am all the time trying to make the answer as I go on living

A CHALLENGE: A look at My Many “Selves”

Perhaps to answer the question – Who/What Am I? – you will need to review and examine your many SELVES.

SELF-IMAGE - How I see myself

REPUTATION - How others see me

ACTUAL SELF - How I am at a given moment and situation

IDEAL SELF - How I would like to be

REAL OR TRUE SELF- How I ought to be according to my true nature as human person

These SELVES, you can know:

·  through the continuing self-assessment, self-examination, reflection

·  through meaningful interaction with others, interaction which helps me become aware of how I am affecting others

Why Do People Behave As They Do

In attempting to improve our understanding of human behavior, we do well to expect complexity and, therefore, keep a number of principles in mind. This means that we should develop the habit of looking for numerous causes, not the cause, of any given behavior. We are also more realistic if we assume that the way something appears to us may well not be the way it looks to others.

From the many studies and theories of human perception and motivation, five principles stand out as being particularly important in exploring why people behave as they do:

1.  Behavior depends on both the person and his environment.

This fact can be verified by both careful observation and research studies. A recent series of experiments explored the effects of different communication patterns upon problem-solving behavior. This study produced two very interesting and significant findings:

a)  It showed clearly that different individuals behave in the same way when they tried to solve a problem within a particular communication pattern or organization. The communication or organizational pattern accounted for the behavior.

b)  With a different organization doing the same task, however, the behavior of individuals was independent of their position in the communication network. The person who first found the answer to the problems varied from trial to trial.

These two findings, taken together, point to one of the principles of behavior, that is of substantial importance to us. Behavior is a consequence of both the person and his environment. What a person does can be determined (1) almost completely by his own skills and capabilities; (2) almost completely by some aspects of the situation; or (3) by some combination of both (usually the case).

Thus, if we want to understand and work effectively with others, we should give attention to the individual and to the situation he is in and to the relation between him and the situation. Some situations tend to activate people in a certain way – ingenuity in ways that do not contribute to the objective intended by some members, etc. Other situations bring about different responses – enthusiasm, responsibility, creativity – from the same person or group. The individual should also expect different members to respond differently to what appears to be the same situation.

This is particularly important to keep in mind when things go wrong and we tend to look for the “scapegoat” – for a person to whom we can attribute blame. It may well be that certain factors in the situation are contributing to the undesired behavior. This principle should also remind us that there are several different ways by which the behavior of a person can be changed: (1) by changing the person himself (developing his skills, increasing his knowledge, etc.); (2) by helping the person to modify the situation in which he works (changing procedures, reorganizing work, involving the person in decision making, listening to him, etc.); or (3) by a combination of these. Each ways has a different consequence for reasons that should become clearer as we consider other principles.

2.  We behave in ways that make sense to us.

Reflect for a moment on your own reaction to a situation you encounter during the course of an hour. You will probably note that these situations are not simply a collection of events to which you respond in a passive way.

Suppose for example, your coordinator tells you he wishes to see you. Your reaction is likely to be “why?” You may begin to recall recent events – to see if you figure out what the coordinator may want to discuss with you. It may be that the answer seem clear and obvious. But what if you can’t remember anything that would explain his calling you in. You may feel a certain amount of anxiety or uneasiness. Why?

We want events in our experiences to “make sense.” Thus, if we hear part of the coordinator’s words, we want to know “what he said” – to understand his statement. We want to know more than the meaning of his words; we also want to know his intent. We are not satisfied – that is, we don’t really feel we understand – until we can put his request in a perspective attributed to the event. If we feel that we understand why he wants to see us, we probably either forget the subject for the time being or we thin rapidly about any changes of plans required by the meetings, etc. But if we feel we don’t understand what his request means, we are likely to spend time “questioning” or seeking more information in whatever way we can.

The human tendency to “make sense” of our experience partly accounts for the origin and spread of rumors. In the absence of information which the individual needs to “round out the picture”, he tends to make up or guess at the facts. Included in his speculations will be guesses as to why the information he wants is not made available to him. His actions are then based on the assumed information. This principle also underscores the importance of adequate communication. If a person has access to information about the situation he is in, he doesn’t have to spend time speculating about what the situation “must be”. Having such information, he can devote more of his energy to accomplishing his job, and he less likely to act on incorrect assumptions and to be plagued by uncertainty and hesitation. The meaning of a situation thus can be viewed as giving direction to our behavior. It follows then that rational behavior is most possible when a person understands what he is trying to accomplish, why it is to be accomplished, and what is required for its accomplishment.

3.  Perception influences experience and behavior.

Our picture of reality (and how we respond to it) is influences by our previous experiences. As a result of our efforts to “make sense” or, and to integrate things that we encounter, each of us develops systematic points of view. These points of view may be called “construct systems”. That is, we organize or construct our experiences in a way that gives them such qualities as value, cause-and-effect relationships, consistency, etc. This construct system forms the basis of our expectations, assumptions, and goals. Thus a success experience in our situation determines to some degree our expectations for success in future situations. For instance, being rejected by one college (or more accurately, feeling that one was rejected) influences a student’s approach to another college… and since all of us have had different unique experiences that we have integrated in our own unique fashion, each of us has a highly individualistic point of view. To each of us, therefore, reality looks different than it does to every other person.

From the standpoint of a leader, the fact that perception influences behavior is particularly important. It points to the need of listening to and observing, rather than judging, another person’s behavior. If we know how another person views something and can recognize that his view differs from our own against the facts of the situation. Thus we stand a chance of modifying behavior (the other persons’ or our own) by changing one basis of it – the perception of the facts.

4.  An individual’s view of himself influences what he does.