I’d like to discuss some ideas around two characteristics of a leader, self-awareness and credibility.

 

Leadership and Self-awareness

 

Having a leadership behaviour means to go further the frontiers, to play in the zone on the limits; because these limits have some degree of mobility, flexibility, allocation, and its trace is thick, the leader will always play around these limits trying to push them, improve, move them to a better place. For playing in this area and going a little be further taking risk, the leader must know her/himself, and when more deeply is this self-awareness, most could play moving those limit taking more risk and without to fail.

 

Therefore, self awareness and unbiased processing can give the leader greater analytical understanding of the team and the organizational performance because the knowledge of one's own strengths and weaknesses and how these impact upon and transform social networks. This knowledge is critical to achieve individual, team and organizational success. For a complete self-understanding personal history include family, childhood, culture, education, occupation, work experience, role models, and prior leadership experiences.

 

but a process whereby one comes to reflect on one’s unique values, identity, emotions, goals, knowledge, talents and/or capabilities, oftentimes triggered by external events.

 

Other interesting topic about the leader self-awareness is related with the feedback from followers. The leader, as part of his/her self-awareness learning process should also focus in followers’ attention on the different challenges. Authentic leaders use their self-awareness process to verify motives and challenges among followers, causing them to provide accurate feedback to facilitate personal growth and development.

 

In other way, each generation of leaders should face different boundary conditions and challenges that they require different skills. The limits are dynamics and the quick and fully adaptation to these moving condition help to the leaders to exert his/her leadership with fullness. The hierarchies of control change and evolve forcing to leader shift to a greater autonomy, self determination, positive emotions, self-acceptance, autonomy, accountability, credibility, self regulated positive behaviour, self development, etc. In this context, self-awareness helps leaders providing a tool to optimize their reaction to those changes and evolving conditions. We have around the world many leaders that they have decreased their leadership because of his/her lack of adaptation, or self-awareness.

 

Self-awareness of personal strengths and weaknesses and then to work on strengths and address weaknesses is a key strategy in the evolving mechanism and to focus energy appropriately. Intelligence and sensitivity attributes help to leaders to develop these mechanisms with naturalness. Once the process becomes natural to the leader, his/her leadership behaviour will enjoy of a powerful tool to continue being a leader and help to the organization, people, society, etc.

 

As summary, without self-awareness, the leader will move as an elephant in a bazaar. The leader should know when and how to look in the mirror rather that out the window and be self-reflexive. By reflecting through introspection, authentic leaders gain clarity and concordance with respect to their core values, identity, emotions, motives and goals. Gaining self-awareness means working to understand how one derives and makes meaning of the world around us based on introspective self-reflective, testing of our own hypotheses and self-schema. Leadership is hard, complex, and can be lonely, discouraged, and unmotivated. Introspection and internal reflection provides the vehicle for transformation, sustainable action, and the development of self-knowledge and emotional intelligence.

 

Leadership Credibility

 

Comparison, people make comparisons all time, our life is a constant and permanent succession of comparisons, and those people that they reach the higher outcome levels in all these comparison will have the privilege of being taken as example.

 

Leaders show a high level of many characteristics such as moral integrity, trustworthy, credibility, etc over the average values from the society.  Trustworthy is a core element of the personal leader identity that s/he must carry and enact in the exercise of his/her leadership. Credibility is established when the leader vision and actions are subsequently confirmed and recognized.

 

To build and gain credibility, actions must match words; in fact, credibility could be considered as a by-product of qualities such as trustworthiness, accountability, reliability, confidence, all values that are won over a long period of time and following solid ethical principles. The conception is slow and progressive, but only one action could break the credibility status and once this link is broken difficultly could be re-established. Authentic leaders gain and sustain credibility by showing they possess the knowledge and expertise that they say to have to consistently deliver tangible results. Leaders should see themselves as credible person and they must act thinking in continually increasing this credibility exhibiting high levels of moral development and conduct. Then, they will take the followers attention and motivation to learn and share her/his vision.

 

 

 

References:

Gardner, W., Avolio, B., Luthans, F. May, D. and Walumbwa, F. (2005). Can you see the real me? A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development. The Leadership Quarterly Vol. 16. pp. 343–372.

Hendricks, J., Cope, V. and Harris, M. (2010). A leadership program in an undergraduate nursing course in Western Australia: Building leaders in our midst. Nurse Education Today Vol. 30. pp. 252–257.

Ilies, R., Morgeson, F., and Nahrgang, J. (2005). Authentic leadership and eudaemonic well-being: Understanding leader–follower outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly Vol. 16. pp 373–394.

Kouzes, J., and Posner, B. (2007). The Leadership Challenge (4^th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.