Integer Leadership Consulting

The awareness and discipline of leading oneself is critical to the exercise of leadership in any organizational context. Yet it is precisely an area that leaders often relegate to the realm of the unimportant and inconsequential because it appears to have little bearing on actual leadership behaviors and practices. Furthermore, because the idea or concept of self-leadership often seems vague, unclear or “soft,” it is easily dispatched to the back-burner of the leader’s personal and professional priorities in favor of more pressing and “hard” issues. Unfortunately, leader’s who disregard the practice and discipline of self-leadership can eventually pay a steep price on the personal and professional level. When leaders become detached from their inner moorings and abandon the work of maintaining inner congruence due to the “tyranny of the urgent,” their integrity, moral compass and external performance is in danger of eventual collapse. This slow-burn or incremental deterioration resulting from the ongoing (and often unconscious) neglect of one’s sense of self, sense of rootedness and personal vision is more often than not realized only after there has been damage to self, others as well as to one’s professional standing and trajectory. The cumulative effect of ignoring the work of self-leadership is not unlike the metaphor of the “Frog in the Kettle.”

I define self-leadership as the ongoing discipline of cultivating inner personal meaning, constructing an engaging personal vision and assessing personal impact.

These three areas of self-leadership: personal meaning, personal vision, and personal impact, form an important nexus that is crucial to professional success. Furthermore, it is my belief that leaders who exercise the discipline of self-leadership as I define it here are the types of leaders that create deep, broad and sustainable change within a variety of organizational contexts. It should be noted, however, that this external impact is not easily wrought. It is the result of cultivating, constructing and assessing…strong words I have deliberately selected to communicate the hard work required for those who would seek to live into a life of self-leadership.

A colloquium on understanding self-leadership would explore the above dimensions in greater depth. The conversation would draw from the experiences of individual leaders and would coincide with organizational resources and spiritual traditions which others have found helpful as they have assumed full responsibility for their own personal and professional development.

As you begin to think about the matter of self-leadership and its urgency in your life, I would ask you to engage in some thoughtful and honest reflection by pondering the following questions.

1. Based on the definition above, in what way have you purposefully and intentionally invested in self-leadership?

2. What are the issues/challenges that prevent or keep you from engaging in the practices of self-leadership?

3. In what ways have others been positively impacted by your self-leadership? How have they been negatively impacted by your lack of self-leadership?

4. In what ways have your professional performance and impact within your organization been helped or hindered by the presence or lack of self-leadership?

5. Who are the people who inspire you to craft a life of self-leadership? Why?