Ditch The Leadership Style

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction, so let's dive straight in to this week's episode. It's very common for people to spend a great deal of time, energy and effort trying to understand and work out their own leadership style, especially at the start of their career. Perhaps when stepping into that first leadership or management job. But here's the thing, in many cases that can be a somewhat futile task. As General David Petraeus said when I interviewed him on my podcast a couple of years ago, tell me what you want me to achieve, tell me the situation, tell me who I'm working with, and then I'll tell you my leadership style. So whilst investing time and effort in working out, our leadership style may not be a good use of time. Working out what our core values are is a brilliant use of time. First of all, let's start by just understanding what we mean by values. For me, they are simply the things that we care about the most in life, generally speaking, probably with the exception only of family. They are non tangible. We can't touch them or put a finger on them. Another way I like to think of values is they are the things that we truly stand for as an individual and they are the things that we will take a stand on. So that's what values are. But why do they matter? Especially for us as leaders, why should we invest the time in getting clear on our values? Because it's a hard thing to do. It's slightly abstract thinking. It's not what we fill most of our days with. Well, understanding our values for me is critical to being an effective leader and there are many reasons why we perhaps should do it. But let me share just three with you right now. Number one, when we're really clear on our values, they help us make decisions in the gray. What I mean by this is so many of the decisions that we need to make as leaders don't have a simple right or wrong, black or white. Answer. We're often working in that grey in the middle ground and sometimes we're making big, difficult, even moral decisions. So how do we do that? Well, we use our values as the filter or the backstop for our decision making. That means even when we have to make tough decisions, we can go home at the end of the day, look ourselves in the mirror and know that we've made the best decision we possibly could. The second reason I believe we should invest time in getting clear on our values is it provides consistency. Sorry. And that consistency is really important to those people. We have the privilege and responsibility to lead. It's very easy to lead a consistent leader. We all want to work for that leader whose behavior we can predict. We know how they're going to show up. We have a sense of what sort of decisions they're going to make. And linked to consistency. Being clear on your values means that we as leaders can choose the tools, tactics, models in terms of leadership that fit with our values. So again, people know what to expect from us. Third reason I'll share with you right now why we really should invest the time in getting clear on our values is it is a great tool for ensuring we are leading a balanced life. And here's what I mean by that. Once you're clear on your values, a protocol you could adopt, one that I use regularly, is every three months. So once a quarter I will review my set of core values and I'll score myself out of five on each value in terms of how well have I done at living up to that value? How well have I done at living up to the things that I know are the most important things in life to me? And I might see that one is slightly off. Perhaps. I haven't invested quite as much time in terms of family and friends as I need to, and I've been really heavy on work. So that means going forward over the next quarter I can adjust my values and keep course correcting and get that balance right. That's it on this first set of four videos around values as part of the Leaders Kit Bag series. I hope it's been useful for you. If you want to know more about values, you can click on the link accompanying this episode where you can download a free toolkit to help you understand your values. And there's an exercise in there for talking about values with your team. And if you're ready to work with me as a coach one on one at some stage in the future, head over to my website where you can join the wait list for one to one coaching with me. That's it for this episode. Look after yourself, look after those. You've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.