Stronger Together - Terri L. Martin

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your understanding. You can connect what you learn from the book with the way you practice leadership. Chances are you already have some sort of leadership team in place. Do you know and understand members’ strengths? Are you using them to reach team goals? If not, challenge yourself to expand your leadership abilities. What should you do first? Have you built the necessary trust? Do you have a common vision? You can choose new ways to look at leadership and new skills to practice. Finally, you can watch the impact your learning has on others. Is greater growth occurring? (We have included many reproducibles you can use to see various aspects of growth.) If so, you are a collaborative leader who is creating a successful learning environment that will profoundly benefit the staff, the community, and most important, the students.

      CHAPTER ONE

      What Kind of Leader Am I?

      Are some people just born with the necessary charisma and drive to lead? Or do people learn the necessary skills along the way? Whether you believe leadership is innate or learned, self-knowledge is critical to its efficacy, a fact that debunks the myth that some people have just the right combination of characteristics to lead others. Harvard Business School professor Bill George (2011) says his research bears this out and that the “essence of leadership comes from not having predefined characteristics. Rather, it comes from knowing yourself—your strengths and weaknesses.” Collaborative leaders are at their best when they know who they are and what they can do.

      Prolific leadership writer Jack Canfield (2005) confirms that “you have to believe in yourself. Whether you call it self-esteem, self-confidence, or self-assurance, it is a deep-seated belief that you have what it takes—the abilities, inner resources, talents, and skills to create your desired results” (p. 40). A collaborative leader has a strong sense of self. Think about this as you reflect on the current reality surrounding who you are as a leader.

      In this chapter, we talk about the skills necessary for you to become a collaborative leader, including truly knowing yourself as one. We ask you to assess your trustworthiness, visioning abilities, and communication styles. Finally, we discuss how you can recognize and enhance your strengths. The end of the chapter includes action steps for increasing your leadership skills. Because improving general leadership skills is the goal here, the steps in this chapter assume you’re working with an assembled team. We explain how to assemble teams in Chapter 3 (page 27).

       EXAMINING YOUR CURRENT REALITY

      As you read this chapter, consider the following questions. Reflect on your personal growth as a leader and your support of growing leadership within your organization.

      • What skills do you bring to the leadership position?

      • Why are these skills important?

      • What difference do they make?

      • What are your challenge areas?

      • What difficulties do they cause?

      • How do you compensate for them?

      Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership for a free reproducible version of this feature box.

      There is a difference between knowing yourself and knowing what kind of leader you are. You may have many great attributes, such as a strong memory or a positive persona. It is good to be aware of those, but how do they affect you as a leader? This understanding is partly about relating what you know to how you would (or would not) use it to support and move an organization forward. It is also thinking about how you think and act in given situations. Self-assessment includes not only metacognition (thinking about your thinking) but also comparing yourself to others in social situations (Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995). It is a good idea to seek feedback from honest, trusted friends and family as well as anonymous feedback from colleagues. Your perception may be different from that of others.

      After taking stock from colleagues, friends, and family, consider looking into a more objective approach. One way to do this is via a data-based personal inventory test such as the Leadership Practices Inventory, or LPI (Kouzes & Posner, 2012; www.leadershipchallenge.com). This inventory, based on years of research, focuses on five distinct practices: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. Different inventories have different areas of emphasis.

      Data-based inventories focus on specific characteristics crucial to effective leadership. For instance, professors Murray Barrick and Michael Mount (1991) tested five personality characteristics (www.outofservice.com/bigfive) and scored how relevant each was in different occupational groups. Their results show that conscientiousness is consistently important. Extraversion predicts managerial and training proficiency, and openness to new experiences correctly predicts how proficient someone is at training others (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Assess your conscientiousness and extraversion. Are you detail oriented about work and careful with others’ feelings? Do you easily begin conversations with others, even with people you don’t know? Professor and leadership author Linda Lambert (1998) asserts that the required skills include helping a team “develop a shared sense of purpose with colleagues, facilitate group processes, communicate well, understand transitions and change and their effects on people, mediate conflict, and hold a keen understanding of adult learning from a constructivist perspective” (p. 18). A constructivist perspective supports learning from experience. Leaders construct their own knowledge from their experiences and reflect on the results of those experiences.

      What if, after assessing yourself for those qualities, whether through an official personality inventory, gathered feedback, or private self-reflection, you discover that you are not naturally extraverted or particularly conscientious? You can work to develop those skills in yourself, just as you can help others work on it; at the end of this chapter, you will find action steps for improving your leadership skills. Research shows that improving your skills also increases your metacognitive abilities, which will help you assess others’ strengths, thereby aiding collaboration (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). You can read a book, attend a workshop, or take a class. You can make a concerted effort.

      You mustn’t have every strength to effectively lead. The collaborative aspect of tapping into others’ strengths helps bolster change because you can build teams of people who have the strengths you lack. For example, you might excel at focusing people on getting things done, but be inexperienced at supporting the people who do the work. See who around you has this particular skill.

      Self-awareness helps build authenticity and trust; avoiding repeat mistakes is a side benefit of this knowledge. Author Kevin Cashman (2014) asserts that “when we are self-aware, we are more in touch with reality; people trust and respect us more.” Completing the “My Leadership Challenges” worksheet (page 14) will help you pinpoint areas that need strengthening. Trustworthiness, visioning ability, and communication style—all important aspects of leading well—are touched on in the following sections and discussed at length in later chapters. In addition to the following strategies, there are action steps for improving your leadership skills at the end of this chapter (page 12).

      Kouzes and Posner (2012) assert that trust is collaborative teamwork’s “lifeblood,” and that it is crucial to maintaining lasting relationships (p. 239). Collaborative leaders show their trustworthiness in everything they do—delivering on promises, doing what they say they are going to do, and living by example. If they break trust (or even just appear to), they work with individuals to discover what happened and figure out how to build back that trust

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