Lead Yourself: Be Where Others Will Follow (Momentum) [Paperback]

Who's steering your boat?. Lead Yourself presents an array of concepts, ideas, and techniques to help you take a greater degree of control over your life. Stimulating you to assess how you think, feel, and behave, it highlights where you need to make changes to become a more effective and fulfilled individual.

Mick Cope is an experienced and inspirational consultant, who has worked in the field of business transformation for 15 years. He has managed both front and back office activities across in-house and commercial organisational development programmes, including systems integration, strategy development, project management, change management, total quality, ISO 9000, process management, Investors in People, European Quality Award, Stephen Covey Seven Habits and a wide range of personal development programmes.

Mick has published widely in the fields of organisational learning, knowledge management, workshop design, change management and personal development and is a regular speaker at international conferences. He is a member of the editorial board of the Knowledge Management Review and is an external examiner for Guildhall Business School. He is also the author the author of Seven Cs of Consulting, Leading the Organisation to Learn, andKnow Your Value – all published by Financial Times Prentice Hall.   --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

We live in a world that faces unseen changes. Within organizations, we see managers struggling to come to terms with new demands on their managerial and leadership style. We have shifted from a position where control is managed by virtue of a formal badge of office (manager, parent, director etc.) to one where we have to lead people through the use of more intangible and flexible forms of leadership.

If we are to lead ourselves and others more effectively, we have to get serious about the idea of personal leadership rather than plastic leadership. To achieve this, the personal leadership framework offered in this book challenges you to consider how you currently lead yourself and others against three key aspects.

- Leadership drivers - the deep inner forces that help and hinder our personal leadership style. They have a major impact on where we get our personal security from, the level of variety with which we view the world, and our ability to build trusting relationships.

- Leadership dimensions - the visible manifestations of our leadership style. We all have a leadership style that consists of three dimensions: how we feel, think and behave. Some of us are dominant in one or have a deficit in another. The essence of personal leadership is to manage the balance between these three factors and to work towards a greater degree of alignment.

- Leadership decisions - the decisions that determine how we lead others and ourselves. We all have to make choices, define where we are going, map the world, manage change, understand others and share success. If we don't make these choices, someone else will make them for us.

This book isn't an exercise in finding fault with your current leadership style, but it will help you discover how you could be different and how to shift the way you feel, think and behave.

Personal leadership drivers

At the heart of personal leadership capability are three drivers. These drivers are the energy that helps us be successful, or the inner voice that spurs us on. But they can also manifest themselves procrastination or as our inner critic. The first step in leading yourself is to understand the three drivers, discover how they influence you and choose what role they play in your new personal leadership style.

- Insecurity versus in-security - ever feel you're not good enough, powerful enough or rich enough? That feeling that you can't do something is generally a figment of your imagination, manufactured by you. Its driver is routed in the curse of insecurity, the sense that you're not good enough to do things that others believe you capable of; as a result you draw your personal power from external validation - like job titles and badges of office. The personal leadership framework will show you a way to manage and reduce this, giving you the power to fulfil your promise. This kind of living and leading is driven by in-security, where your personal energy comes from within rather than from outside.

- Restricted variety versus rich variety - as the world becomes more and more complex, we must respond with increasing originality, diversity and richness. Often our thoughts are stifled, but by broadening our view of the world, we create more choices, and operate from the perspective of rich variety, using a personal map that offers us a multitude of options and choices.

- Thin trust versus thick trust - in an ever more fragmented and disparate world, we rely increasingly on our ability to build and maintain successful relationships. Every time we meet or interact with someone, face to face, or by mail or e-mail, we draw on one single question to determine if the relationship will work: can I trust this person? No longer is trust a soft variable, it's now the hard factor that binds commercial and caring relationships in a world that is disentangling at Internet speed. Thin relationships are those grounded in only partial or limited trust, whereas thick relationships are solid and lasting.

The importance of ensuring that your three drivers are in-security, rich variety and thick trust can't be underestimated. Just think about the last time you read a personal development book, attended a training course or made a decision to improve a certain part of your life. Remember early promises, full of excitement and focus? They soon turn into pockets empty of improvement once you hit reality. Change isn't quite so easy as you thought it might be. Failure to realize planned personal improvement is usually one of several types:

- Once faced with a personal challenge in the area you want to improve, the little inner voice kicks in and challenges your assumptions. Insecurity whispers in your ear: 'are you really ready to give up smoking?'; 'do you really think that this time-management tool will help?'; 'you're not as good as those people, what makes you think that you can tell them what to do?'

- Back from the personal development course all fired up with a new set of ideas and goals, you find they collapse in a heap once you try to use them. The problem is that you're trying to implement a new set of ideals using a redundant map of the world. You're still operating with your old, restricted vision and haven't thought about how to introduce a richer variety into the way you lead yourself.

- You've learnt new ways of thinking, watched the video on how to build relationships and listened to the guru telling you their innermost secrets that helped them make a million. But when you go back to the workplace and try to effect a change, you're still operating on relationships precariously balanced on thin trust. Before you can make any change in your relationships you must understand how to build and maintain thick trust. Without this, all the new positive-thinking techniques will be just that, positive thinking without positive action. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.