Leadership requires both self-awareness and selflessness. Effective leaders know how to balance the purpose of their organization with their own self-interests.

Today’s post is by Jan Rutherford – author of The Littlest Green Beret. You can learn more about Jan at the end of this post.

The thing about leadership development is that it all starts with everyone’s favorite subject – themselves. Self awareness is the starting point for effective leadership, and it’s always interesting to watch my students obsess about survey results, feedback from peers, aptitude tests, and what it all means to their careers. The focus shouldn’t be on oneself, but on the leader’s effect on others. That is, our primary leadership tool is how we effectively communicate.

The variables are simply how well do we listen and how well do we speak to align expectations and achieve results? Ultimately, we control two things: where we spend our time, and how we respond to our environment. What priorities will best produce the results we’re after, and what attitude will we choose to deal with everyday ups and downs? After all, a leader’s environment is largely made up with a bevy of complex and unending interpersonal relationships.

Nick Petrie once published a brilliant white paper on “Future Trends in Leadership Development” where he discussed the transfer of greater developmental ownership to the individual. As a strong proponent of self-reliant leadership, I believe Petrie expertly articulated the need for developmental ownership to be squarely on the shoulders of the individual. Leadership can be an illusion of control, but changing your perspective on everyday experiences can provide inspirational learning opportunities for personal growth and development.

What questions should you routinely ask yourself? On a daily basis, what steps should you take to find personal success in your life’s work? Do you know your life’s work? Some say it’s the place where your passion and others’ needs intersect. I believe a key determinant of success is whether you can rely on yourself for self-coaching. However, self-reliant leadership is dependent on achieving a balance between independence and the interdependence of working with others to accelerate your own personal growth and development.

Self-reliance and leadership may seem to be contradictory notions, but there are three mutually supporting concepts:

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Conflict is an ever-present part of life. The more comfortable you are with dealing with it, the more effectively you can resolve it. Conflict resolution requires you to know the three R’s – recognize conflict, respond to conflict, and resolve the conflict.

Today’s post is by Jon Wortmann, thoughtLEADERS principal and author of Hijacked by Your Brain. He’s our primary instructor for our Conflict Resolution course.

The meeting had been going so well until Josh brought up the org chart—again. The firm had made some changes recently and he didn’t like the new structure. The room went still. Kate, the most senior leader in the room, spoke up. “Josh, let’s finish our planning and we can talk about structure later.”

“I am talking about planning,” Josh said. “How can we plan the roll-out if we don’t know how our new structure will execute it?” Josh was a pro at reframing any issue to bring up his agenda. If he weren’t such a talented designer, he would not have lasted this long.

What should Kate say next?

Conflict is like the weather. No matter how many good days you have in a row, eventually it will rain. And as rain is essential to the earth, conflict is actually crucial for every team and organization. The conflict Josh is creating may feel pointless, even manipulative. Well handled, it can be the kind of moment every leader and manager welcomes. It is better to see frustration and resolve it than have it buried. Teammates that hide their true impressions don’t engage real problem solving. Open conflict resolved consistently builds trust.

What Kate says next will either be a reaction based on the stress conflict causes, or it can be an intentional, practiced approach. The fear of conflict doesn’t come from our apprehension about differing opinions or disagreements. Most of us like the learning that comes from new ideas and being intellectually challenged. Our anxiety comes out when we don’t know how to manage and resolve the heated conversations and meetings that stop us from working well with the people on our teams.

In every conflict scenario, the first skill is to recognize it. When people experience conflict, we get triggered. As lions roar, rabbits run, deer freeze, and geese flock under stress, we’ve discovered that people revert to four reactions in conflict. We become passive-aggressive, confrontational, avoidant, or compliant.

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