Unit 8 The Leadership Life

Overview

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In our last unit, we integrate everything we’ve been learning about by focusing on the knowing, being, and doing of leadership—that is, the head, heart, and hands. We focus specifically on the connection between being and doing. This is an important aspect of authentic leadership to think about. How we connect the dots between doing and being as individuals helps us clarify our personal understanding of what leadership is and how we want to live out our leadership. You will have opportunities to reflect on your purpose, your motivation to lead, and how you want to be as you lead.

Metaphors help us create frameworks of understanding, expand our thinking, go deeper into subjects, and help us create order with our thoughts. We look at leadership metaphors and guide you through the process of creating your own leadership metaphor—something that will help ground you and nurture your leadership.

Lastly, we look at leadership as a lifelong journey. Great leaders create spaces for learning and have an openness and a willingness to learn and grow. Various ways that leaders participate in learning are presented. Similarly, you will engage in activities to help you identify your own leadership goals and ways that you can continue to learn and grow in your leadership.

Let’s begin.

Topics

This unit is divided into the following topics:

• Knowing, Being, and Doing
  
• Leadership Metaphors
  
• Leadership as a life-long journey

Learning Outcomes

When you have completed this unit, you should be able to:

• Explain how the concepts of self-awareness, values, and purpose relate to effective leadership
  
• Discuss how our beliefs about leadership affect everything we do as a leader
  
• Develop a personal leadership metaphor
  
• Identify ways you will engage in lifelong learning as a leader

Activity Checklist

Learning Activities

Here is a checklist of learning activities you will benefit from in completing this unit. You may find it useful for planning your work.

• Leadership Reflections (75 minutes)
  • Reflect on the question prompts.
    
  • Watch the TED Talk Be Humble—And Other Lessons from the Philosophy of Water (9:34 minutes)
    
  • Participate in the Leadership Reflections discussion forum.
    
• Your Leadership Metaphor (90 minutes)
  • Create a metaphor to guide your leadership.
    
• Your Learning Goals and Plan (75 minutes)
  • Respond to the reflection questions in your learning journal.
    • Identify your learning goals in your learning journal.
      
    • Review your goals and scale them back if they feel overwhelming right now.
      

Assessment

In this course you demonstrate your understanding of the course learning outcomes in various ways. Please see the Assessment section in Moodle for assignment details and due dates.

Resources

Here are the resources you will need to complete this unit.

• Online resources will be provided in the unit.

8.1 Knowing, Being, and Doing

Image credit: Jonathan McClellan

“The world is in desperate need of a different leadership role model.”

– Ken Blanchard

The challenge of leadership is integrating your knowledge—everything you’ve learned about good leadership—into your being and how you interact with others. This integration will naturally translate into changes in your behaviour and actions that will engage and inspire those around you.

We’ve focused on three main questions throughout the course:

• Who am I?
  
• What do I believe?
  
• How do I live out what I believe?

Who you are matters—and so do your beliefs. Your beliefs about leadership will impact and change your life. Your beliefs affect your vision, your relationships, your decisions, and every action you take as a leader. So how do we draw a connective line between what we believe and what we do?

Authentic leaders have discovered their True North, align people around a shared purpose and values, and empower them to lead authentically to create value for all stakeholders. Authentic leaders are true to themselves and to what they believe in. They create trust and develop genuine connections with others. Because people trust them, authentic leaders are able to motivate them to achieve high levels of performance.

What is the connection then, between being and doing? This is a really important aspect of authentic leadership to think about. How we connect the dots between doing and being as individuals helps us clarify our personal understanding of what we think leadership looks like and acts like. One could argue that the doing component of leadership is far less important than the being component. A leader’s presence with their team has a much greater impact than the way in which they execute in terms of doing.

Here are just a few ideas about what doing is, and what being is. I’m sure you can add many other ideas to these lists, and I do encourage you to think about what this looks like in your own life.

Doing	Being
Tasks	Understanding yourself
Performing	Understanding the context
Monitoring progress	Being fully present
Ensuring quality	Focusing on others

Leadership Call to Action

I encourage you to think about this call to action, as part of your development toward becoming an authentic leader:

• Regularly assess how you are being as a leader.
  
• Recognize how emotionally present and supportive you are being with others.
  
• Consider the kind of leader others need you to be and provide the support they need.
  
• Tune into others and be aware of the interpersonal impact you are having in all your relationships.

An important question to always be aware of in any situation is this: Am I too focused on doing leadership than on being a good leader? This should help ground you in any situation.

Leadership should never be anything you take lightly or for granted. Are you ready to be the leader the world so desperately needs? Be encouraged and inspired by this verse, “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love” (Ephesians 4:2).

Activity: Leadership Reflections

• As this course draws to a close, you are encouraged to reflect on the following questions:

1. Does leadership exist at all levels?
   
2. What have you discovered about your purpose?
   
3. What have you discovered is driving or motivating you to lead?
   
4. What have you observed is driving or motivating those around you to lead?
   
5. How have you communicated differently as a result of what you’ve been learning?
   
6. Have you inspired someone as a result of your learning throughout this course?

• Next, watch the following video: Be Humble—And Other Lessons from the Philosophy of Water (9:34 minutes)

• After watching the video, reflect on the following: Humility. Harmony. Openness. Three characteristics of authentic leaders. These are important ways of being for all of us, especially as leaders. How do you want to be as you lead? Record your thoughts in your learning journal.

• Lastly, participate in the Leadership Reflections discussion forum to share and discuss how your thinking about leadership has shifted over the past several weeks.

I used to think…

And now I think…

Note that these learning activities are ungraded, but are designed to help you succeed in your assessments in this course.

8.2 Leadership Metaphors

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Metaphors help us create frameworks of understanding, expand our thinking, go deeper into subjects, and help us organize our thoughts. They are generative because they come out of the imagination. They are visual imaginings that allow us to open our thinking, inspire creativity, and invite others to discover complimentary meanings. Bill George uses the metaphor of a compass. Others may use an orchestra conductor, the ocean, or a master chef as metaphors. Your own leadership metaphor will be unique to you.

We like to use a tree as a metaphor to understand ourselves in leadership.

The main parts of the tree include the soil it grows in, the roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaves, and the fruit. Each of these parts could mean different things for each of us.

• The soil is our foundation and our identity—it’s what grounds us and is vital to life. For many Christians, Jesus Christ is our soil and foundation.
  
• The roots are our values—what’s important to us. Our values influence our attitudes and actions, and determine our priorities and our evaluation of life.
  
• The trunk is our core beliefs—what guides us.
  
• The branches are our characteristics—what others see: our personality, our nature, our character.
  
• The leaves are our actions—what we do and how we behave.
  
• The fruit are the results—what we achieve, especially the impact we have on others.

Care must be taken to nurture the tree. A gardener cares for their trees in many ways. They:

• Brace and support the trunk when the tree is young to ensure it grows up straight and strong.
  
• Water and fertilize the tree.
  
• Monitor and protect the tree against insects and disease.
  
• Harvest the crop when it is ready—not too early and not too late.
  
• Prune the tree to promote good growth, reduce weight on heavy limbs, and help retain the tree’s natural shape.

This is a cycle that takes place year after year after year. Monitoring and managing their trees ensures a long, full, and productive life of the orchard.

For us, nurturing our leadership could be regularly practicing self-reflection and introspection, seeking feedback from our support team, self-care activities, rest, exercise, good nutrition and hydration, meditation or mindfulness, and regular down-time and vacation. Caring for ourselves builds resilience and can improve our performance as leaders.

Leadership is a tremendous responsibility and a tremendous privilege—we must treat it with respect, love, and great care.

Activity: Your Leadership Metaphor

Creating your own leadership metaphor will help guide your leadership and serve as an important reminder of how you want to be as a leader.

Your metaphor should be representative of your life purpose and a reminder of what is most essential in your life. You can create your metaphor in a variety of creative ways.

• Begin by brainstorming all the words that come to mind when you think about authentic leadership. Include your values and what’s important to you. You might find a word cloud or mind map helpful for this activity.

You might find these steps helpful:

1. Identify a solution or outcome that is desperately needed in the world, in your community, or in your organization.
   
2. Identify an element in nature that inspires you. This could be a tree, the ocean, the wind, a mountain, a garden, or anything you find inspiring.
   
3. Identify the qualities within the element that inspires you. For example, is it strong, majestic, renewable, calm, solid, etc.
4. Identify who it is that will benefit from your solution? Is it your family, your community, your team, mankind?
   
5. Identify what they will be able to do or how they will be impacted as a result of your solution.

Your metaphor statement could look like this:

I am a _______2________, who ______3________, who helps ________4_________ to ________1___________ so that they may ________5_________.

Or you can simply sketch or draw your metaphor and write a statement about what this metaphor means to you and how you will use it to guide your leadership.

Don’t worry about getting it “right” or perfect—it will evolve over time and throughout your leadership journey. The idea is to make a connection between who you are and what you want to offer the world. Creating a personal metaphor that reminds you of your own greatness can be how you serve the world, and a way to inspire yourself each day.

8.3 Leadership as a Life-Long Journey

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“Leadership is a journey, not a destination.”

– Bill George

Leaders who embrace the idea that learning in leadership is a lifelong process see learning not simply as a periodic experience, but rather an endeavour they commit to as a way of daily life. All great leaders create spaces for learning and have an openness and a willingness to learn and grow. They are willing to have their views and perspectives challenged and create an environment that actually encourages it.

There are lots of ways to engage in lifelong learning, including:

• Taking courses
  
• Attending conferences, workshops, and seminars
  
• Reading books and articles
  
• Joining (or starting) a leadership book club
  
• Listening to leadership podcasts
  
• Watching leadership TED Talks
  
• Subscribing to newsletters, online magazines, or blogs from some of your favourite leaders
  
• Expanding your social and professional networks
  
• Follow some of your favourite thought leaders and leadership experts on social media (a few of my favourites include Simon Sinek, Brené Brown, John C. Maxwell, and Sheryl Sandberg)
  
• Finding a mentor
  
• Self-reflection and introspection

Thinking about leadership as a pursuit in lifelong learning keeps us motivated, curious, and helps us reach our goals. Devoting time and effort to learning and improving gives us a sense of accomplishment, self-confidence, and can help keep us oriented toward our True North.

Activity: Your Learning Goals and Plan

• Respond to the following reflection questions in your learning journal:

1. What are some ways you will continue to grow as leader?
   
2. What are some specific skills you want to further develop?
   
3. How can you develop these skills?
   
4. Who can help you work on your goals?

• Next, identify your learning goals by jotting them down in your learning journal. As you set your learning goals, consider the following:

1. What are my goals?
   
2. Why are these goals important to me?
   
3. How will I know when I’ve succeeded?
   
4. Do I have the resources I need to accomplish my goal? If not, how can I get the resources I need?
   
5. Is this goal a reasonable stretch for me?
   
6. Is this goal worthwhile for me right now?
   
7. Am I willing to commit to achieving this goal?
   
8. When do I need to accomplish this goal by?
   
9. What can I do today to help me achieve my goal?

Review your goals. Do they excite or overwhelm you? If you feel overwhelmed, try scaling your goals back to something that feels more manageable right now. Your goals should excite you and make you feel hopeful for what lies ahead!

Unit Summary

In this final unit, you learned about the importance of knowing, doing, and being in leadership. You made connections between your beliefs and your vision, relationships, decisions, and actions. You reflected on a call to action to regularly assess how you are being as a leader, recognize how emotionally present you are with others, and being aware of the interpersonal impact you are having in your relationships.

You learned about leadership metaphors and why they are important. You had an opportunity to create your own metaphor that will ground you and guide your leadership. Our leadership metaphors will continue to evolve throughout our leadership journey. Keep your metaphor handy and refer to it often. Revise it as needed to help keep you focused on your True North.

The greatest leaders never stop learning. Leadership is a journey, not a destination. We continue to grow and develop in our leadership throughout our lives. You identified some of your own leadership goals and identified ways to achieve them and continue growing and developing.

I am so excited for you as you continue on your leadership journey and wish you much success along the way! I will leave you with these wise words from Lao Tzu:

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

Checking your Learning

As you complete this unit, you may want to check to make sure that you are able to:

• Explain how the concepts of self-awareness, values, and purpose relate to effective leadership.
  
• Discuss how our beliefs about leadership affect everything we do as a leader.
  
• Develop your own personal leadership metaphor.
  
• Identify your leadership goals and how you can meet them.
  
• Identify ways you will engage in lifelong learning as a leader.