Cultivating Your Own Leadership Potential

Develop leadership by understanding yourself, understanding others' values and communication, and being brave in handling tough conversations and challenges.

Cultivating your leadership potential is one of the most important things that you can do for your professional development today. So today I'm going to talk to you about three different things you can do to develop your leadership potential. One, you really have to understand yourself.

Two, you really have to understand others. And three, a leader has to be brave. So I've read a lot of books and seen a lot of people talk about leadership and there's always one thing that they come back down to and that's for you to understand yourself.

Now you may be thinking, I've lived with me forever. Of course I know who I am. Of course I know what I'm good at.

But the reality is is that if we are not thoughtful about our behaviors and our actions, it can become very easy for us to behave or act in ways that do not truly reflect our values and our beliefs. So a very brief exercise that you can do is to take a moment after any interaction to think about how that interaction actually went and if it was as effective as you think. Was I in this moment living in my values? Hold on Cait, let's rewind back a little further.

I'm not even sure what my values are. So maybe before you even debrief about what happened during any interaction is you may have to take a few moments to really crystallize and understand who you are and what you stand for. So Brene Brown in one of her books does this awesome exercise where she has a list of values and she asks you to pick your top two values.

And when you have these top two values, you really have to take a look at your different endeavors that you've done, maybe an interaction with another person or maybe something you've accomplished and ask yourself, am I living in my values? Do my behaviors reflect who I stand for and who I want to be? And on the other side of this is are there any behaviors or actions that I am doing today that are not living in my values? Another question that you can ask yourself is what happens when my values are in conflict? Now sometimes this is really easy because our values are in line with each other. Maybe you have a value about teamwork and cooperation. Well really ultimately a lot of ways those are the same thing.

But what happens when you have a value like teamwork and your other value is honesty? Think about are there some times where these values may be in conflict with each other and how do you choose which one to bring above the other? Understanding yourself means that you are going to use your understanding in order to make the most effective choice. It's going to help you to prioritize which one of these is more important. Sometimes you may also choose to adjust this based on the circumstance.

Maybe in this circumstance teamwork is the most important thing that I can do today because that's what this situation needs. Whereas maybe in this other circumstance being honest is going to ultimately support my goal of teamwork in a more effective way. So it's really essential that you understand who you are and what you stand for in order for you to be the most authentic version of yourself.

So the second thing that you have to do when you're developing your leadership potential is really understand others. So now you've taken the time to understand what your values are but there's always another person in that interaction who's bringing to the table their own values, their own experiences. And in order for you to effectively communicate with them you really have to take a few minutes to think about what are their values? How do their values compare with my values? How do they communicate? Some of us are very effective communicators.

Some of us may have more struggles with that. Some of us may be able to walk into a room of strangers and talk to anyone and feel completely comfortable. Some of us may be a little nervous about that and our behavior may reflect that nervousness and therefore make us come off in ways that we may not intend them to.

So when I'm having an interaction with someone else I have to bring in my understanding of who they are, what they want, how they like to be communicated to, and how I can effectively work with them to accomplish our mutual goals. So whenever I'm going to be talking to someone else I have to make sure that I do understand them as well. Everybody comes to the table with their own unique set of values, experiences, and wants.

And if I want to be able to communicate effectively with them or I want them to follow me as a leader I have to make sure I understand them. Now I may not always agree with anyone I'm having a discussion with and I may not always agree with the different people I'm leading but I have to respect them and I have to understand where they're coming from. I have to be able to see that their what their values are in order to help us support our common goal.

And when they're looking at me I would want them to be able to look at me and say I can tell just by your behaviors what your values are. So it's a really important two-way street in order to have the most effective conversations and in order to have the most successful accomplishments. So my final piece of leadership advice is to be brave.

Now that sounds like something that's really easy to say, right? But what does that actually mean? So most of the difficult conversations or actions or behaviors that you may need to do are going to be hard. And so many of us really don't like to be involved with hard things. That's human nature, right? We say oh that sounds hard I don't know if I want to do it.

Or we may think to ourself this is going to be a really awkward conversation so I'm just going to put it off as long as possible. The reality is is that when we are dealing with hard situations or awkward conversations we need to address them head on in order to really be an effective leader. So I would encourage you to look at things going forward as an opportunity to develop yourself as a leader.

And you can just remember that even if something doesn't go exactly as you planned this is a learning opportunity for you to say hmm was I living in my values? Well maybe not. How can I do this more effectively? Or oh that conversation did not go as I planned maybe I wasn't understanding where that person was coming from in an effective way. So I want you to think of every opportunity even the scary ones as an opportunity for you to build your leadership muscles and to develop into the kind of leader that you want to be today.

So in conclusion the most important things you can do to develop your leadership potential is one, understand yourself, two, understand others, and three, be brave. I know you can do hard things.