The start of Personal Leadership

Now that we have discussed the why and on a high level the how, let us dive more into the details and a practical approach to start. As I have mentioned in part 1 a lot of our dissatisfaction comes from a wrong alignment of our actions, behavior and thoughts with our personality and motives.

To make this more clear I like to use the competence Ice berg of McClelland. It’s a famous model in the business environment for its use surrounding hiring, job crafting, competency management, personal development, and many other things. A fun fact (at least for me) is that the underlying work to create the iceberg was done by McClelland (It’s mostly based on his human motivation work which we will get back to in another article) but the model itself was conceptualized by Spencer & Spencer in 1993(1). The first version of the model is depicted below:

In the courses on personal leadership & leadership, I like to use a slightly adapted version of the model that is more clear in practice. I have added it below.

In fact if you now think about it you probably have done enough with Personal Leadership over the years but didn’t call it like this. A situation that made you doubt your values & beliefs, hurt your self-esteem, or even made you question your motives in life can turn into a life lesson if we approach it like this (a chance for learning). On the other hand, if we start blaming others or the government or whoever ever in this situation the reverse effect will become apparent and we will “freeze in our ways”.

The more authentic growth we make happen, the more ownership we are likely to take since we can see the positive effects. However, if we do not take the ownership but blame others, we will stay unconscious of our behaviour and most likely stay unhappy with the situation for ourselves and quite possibly keep creating bad situations for ourselves. So the path of Personal Leadership is one of traveling up the spiral, while the reverse is going down the drain.

The point of the model is to show that what makes a full human being is only partially visible. According to Spencer & Spencer, the 80/20 rule applies here, we only see 20% of what ultimately drives our behavior. So when we want to see if we are suitable for a job or understand why we are not performing in a job for example we have to look for the driving indicators under the waterline more than above the waterline if we want to find the true answers.

In Personal Leadership the same applies. If we want to get “to the bottom” of why we are behaving in a certain manner or why we are not happy with our current job for example we have to look further than our competences (above the water line). A good example is my last job. I think I was competent enough to do the job and also had success in it, but I was not happy with it. So on a competence level, everything seemed fine, but the alignment with my values, personality and motives was off. As my girlfriend put it: “I have never seen anybody so competent in something while being so unhappy”.

[1] Spencer, L. M. JR. & Spencer, S. M., Competence at Work: Model for Superior Performance, John Wiley & Sons, p.11, 1993

In the next couple of articles we will examine each layer piece by piece and it will give you tools to analyse your own layers and behaviour. In this way, you can, step by step, start working on your development through Personal Leadership.

Within the Personal Leadership course, I like to approach the Iceberg bottom up. We will start with examining human motivation and try to figure out what drives us. We then start looking towards our personality and our characteristics and try to examine where our behavior comes from and how we can make sense of conflict situations. Moving further up we will examine our values and beliefs and try to figure out how this influences our behaviour and our relationship with others.

The next step is to look at how this affects our communication with others. In this case the single Iceberg turns into multiple icebergs and we will examine how this influences our behaviour toward each other. Throughout the entire course, we will use examples of our real lives to analyze our own behavior and see from which layer it’s coming and what we can do to change it.

Personal Leadership can start from any level you want to start from. You can start with your behaviour that you want to change and start analyzing down into the iceberg. You can also start with your values and beliefs and see how these influence your behavior for example.

We didn’t discuss it in the last article but coming back to the Personal Leadership cycle we see a spiral in the middle. Depending on whether we take ownership or blame others this spiral will go up or down.

Unfortunately, it still does not mean that we will shoot straight up and be happy and fulfilled forever. As any road, it is one with falling and getting up, 2 steps forward three steps back and it won't always be easy. But if we can have support from others and laugh about it sometimes, at least in the end it will be funny.