Ramon Estrada argues that leadership rests on character, not achievements. Three cultural forces erode it: fear from media, instant gratification, and blame. He offers three practices to build it: pause to examine your beliefs, shift perspective when misaligned, and reshape your expectations through the Pygmalion effect.
If you consider yourself a leader, or you want to become a better one, this video will help you a great deal, because we will be talking about the importance of building character in the journey to leadership. Hi, my name is Ramon Estrada, and I help leaders to grow their organizations through creative and innovative approaches. Often when people think about the journey to leadership, they think about external things that they need to do. In fact, Stephen Covey, author of the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, argues that the journey to leadership starts with character, and character is much more important than achievements if you want to be a successful leader. So today I will explain what character is, how culture affects it, and 3 techniques that you can follow to develop it. When we talk about character, we mainly refer to the inner morals and ethical principles that a person has developed all over the years and how this affects all and every one of their actions. Through character, we unconsciously develop patterns. These patterns will become eventually habits, and these habits will affect your path towards leadership. So if you want to be a good leader, you need to make sure that you are building a good character. And through a good character as well, you will develop a good intuition. Our intuition is also highly dependent on your character. So as a leader, you will eventually have a lot of decisions to make, and it will be really important to trust in your gut. As humans, we live an integrated life. What we do affects others, and what others do affects us, and this includes our work. I will talk about 3 cultural problems that affect our leadership development. The first one would be fear and insecurity. We can probably not escape to all the messages that we are receiving constantly on social media, newspapers, Even at movies about insecurity, about wars, economy, politics, and all these things that are outside of our circle of influence or where we can affect it. So the thing is that the result of all these messages and all these situations is that we feel insecure. We are not feeling safe. This could make us be dependent on ourselves. We don't want to interact with the others. But actually, this is a huge problem for leadership, because as a leader we want to achieve results, and meaningful and important results are highly dependent on our interaction with other people. Just as your team relies on your leadership, you rely on your team to execute and deliver the projects and the actions in the quality, the time, and the cost that you need them to. The second one would be instant gratification. With all the advancements in technology that we are having today, we have services like Amazon Prime or Netflix where if we want a book or we want a movie, we want a CD or whatever, we can have it immediately. But think for a second on this: are you really having your objectives in 5 and 10 years In your hand inside, or you are focusing mostly on the things immediate to you. This, of course, brings us a sense of satisfaction, but following immediate satisfaction will not get you where you want to go. The third one is blame and victimization. The truth is, blame is chaining us to our past. And let's be clear here, I am not talking about our past not affecting our present or even future self. In fact, as we mentioned in the Authentic Leadership video, accepting and recognizing our past, taking responsibility for our actions, and knowing where we want to go and how we can change are key ingredients to become an authentic and effective leader. So shift the focus, stop blaming, stop playing the victim role, Take responsibility and know that you are where you are because of the decisions that you took, and you can always do better than that. Empower yourself and become a better leader. For leadership development, it is essential to recognize how you view the world and where it needs to be upgraded. In his book, Stephen Covey explains 3 aspects to be taken care of to build your character. Everything we do, in or out of work, comes from our perspectives. Our perceptions eventually become reality because they dictate our actions. This is commonly known as the Pygmalion effect, and it has a huge consequence on leaders. For example, if we imagine someone in our team will fail, we might unconsciously do some actions that will facilitate that failure. So it is an imperative of leadership development to be conscious about our perceptions. Although character and personality seem to be synonyms, they are actually 2 different things. Think about an iceberg. Personality is the tip of the iceberg, the things that people see about you, but actually character is below the sea. This is your internal values. Stephen Covey found out that in the past 150 years, most of the books talked about success as a result of character. But in the past 50 years, most of the books speak about success in terms of personality traits. And that's totally incorrect. Because if you want to rely on a successful career and become a successful leader, you need to take care of your character. And personality traits are usually a quick fix. So if you really want to have a successful career as a leader, you need to focus on character, because if your character is flawed, eventually it will show in your personality. Our paradigms are our own personal map of the world, guiding us while seeing and exploring the world. Think of a paradigm like all your perceptions, all your education in one place, allowing you to explore and to act in this life. But think about it, in a territory there are many maps. It happens the same in your team. Your own personal viewpoint is not the only one there. Paradigms are deeply important because the way we see the world, we will act on it, affecting our teammates, our families, and all the people around us. In order to build your character, you need to work on the Pygmalion effect The character ethic and your paradigms. Maybe it does not seem that easy because you, you have been living and working in this way unconsciously for many years. But take the time, pause, reflect, and bring in your conscious part, understanding your life, who you are, where you want to go. And if then something is not feeling right on you— Change your perspective. Learn and do another action. Thank you for watching this video. If you want to learn more about creativity, innovation, and leadership, follow me and subscribe in this channel. I will be posting videos every week. See you then.
