Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders - February 2022
Welcome to the February 2022 edition of Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders! This is my monthly leadership learning blog where I bring together my Friday Shares from the Purple Sky Consulting LinkedIn page and other topics of interest.
Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders will take a deeper look into each of the Friday Shares or topics and build on them, as a supportive learning resource for all leaders.
As subscribers of Purple Sky Consulting, you get first access to Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders, this will then be made available to others later in the month. You can continue to have access to all Purple Sky Thinking articles and resources through the open access Purple Sky Thinking pages.
Friday Share 24 - “Earn your leadership every day” - Michael Jordan
Image credit - https://www.goalcast.com
Considering who you really are as a leader is an important step in understanding your impact. Are you leading in a way that you want and where you might want to make changes?
A good place to start is asking yourself this useful question: ‘Am I a leader that I would want to follow?’
Activity:
To explore this further, consider these questions:
What actions best describe how I really lead? e.g. organised, delegating etc
What behaviours best describe how I really lead? e.g. compassion, controlling etc
What kind of leadership is important to me?
Now, based on your own description of what is important to you in leadership and how you have described your own leadership:
What do you want to celebrate and continue or do more of?
What do you want to stop?
What do you want to start practicing to support you doing something differently or new?
You might be asking yourself, what do I do now?
It might be useful to get some feedback from your own leader, peers and most importantly your team! Make sure you are specific with them, don’t just ask ‘am I a good leader?’. Think about asking them ‘how do I make a difference to your day’ or ‘what advice could they give me’ about a specific action or behaviour you want to do more.
Once you have this, write your own list or create your own visual of the leader you want to be, use this as a regular check in with yourself on how you are doing and what you want to keep practicing.
Keep looking for resources and inspiration for the things you have on your list so that you can keep growing and learning. Then repeat the exercise at intervals that make sense to you so that it stays relevant.
Friday Share 25
“6 Key Active Listening Skills”
The Centre for Creative Leadership
How do you feel when someone isn’t really listening to you? They might have their phone in front of them and they keep checking it or they jump in and finish your sentences?
I won’t lie, this is a skill that I am definitely still working on. It isn’t an easy one but it is incredibly important to the people that you lead, they want you to actively listen to them. You don’t have the be a master of it immediately but taking steps to improve these skills and demonstrate it consistently, will make a difference to how your team feel about you and how they feel about themselves.
The Center for Creative Leadership have put this helpful graphic together as a reminder of the key skills for Active Listening along with an article that brings the importance of this to life. The article shares more insight to each of the Active Listening skills and they also share additional resources to support you in developing your listening skills.
Here’s the link to the article: Use 6 Active Listening Skills & Techniques to Coach Others | CCL.
Now that you have considered the article, what stood out for you? Which of the Active Listening skills do you already practice? What benefits do you see of improving these further?
Activity:
For each of the 6 key skills rate how well do you already do these, you might want to ask for feedback too.
Give yourself a score out of 0-10, e.g. where 10 is excellent and 0 is where you know you don’t actively practice that skill. Write down these scores and a few notes for yourself, so you can remember why you gave yourself that score.
Choose 2 of the skills to actively practice over the next month and diarise to review your progress in a month’s time. Use the article I’ve shared with you for ideas on how you can practice those skills.
At that review time, consider if your scores have changed for the 2 skills you were practicing, if they have or haven’t what do you think the reasons for that are?
Now look at the scores for the other 4, have you noticed anything about those listening skills as a result of focusing on the other 2?
Consider what actions you want to take now as a result of this review.
Capture the actions and set some time aside to review these actions and how you feel about your ability to actively listen. Also consider, how it has impacted on your interaction and relationships with your team.
Friday Share 26
“Imposter Syndrome v. Self-Compassion”
Susan David Ph.D
I’m not a huge fan of the term ‘Imposter Syndrome’ for many reasons, the main reason is that I feel it gives the habit of negative self-talk legitimacy and something that can’t be changed. I would prefer for this negative self-talk to not have a label handed to it but for it to be recognised for what it is - a harmful habit that can be changed.
Let me be clear, I’m not trying to dismiss the feels and thoughts that someone has, those thoughts and feelings are real. What I do believe that those thoughts and feelings can be changed, so that the person experiencing them can actually begin to feel and think differently, so that they begin a new habit, one that is compassionate and kinder.
As a leader, there will be moments when you or a member of your team has a habit of negative self-talk e.g. “I never do well”, “I don’t think I can do it, what if they think that too”, “I don’t deserve this opportunity”, “they only wanted me to do it because nobody else was available”…I’m sure you can add your own to this list.
Left unchecked, this self-talk can be a habit that never improves but it doesn’t have to be that way. The benefits of changing the self-talk to be positive, kinder language is a habit that you should encourage for yourself and with others.
Consider the work of Susan David Ph. D who’s focus is on Emotional Agility (she has a great TED Talk too on emotional courage) and this feeds into the graphic below. What does your negative self-talk sound like? What do you tell yourself regularly that reinforce a feeling that you don’t deserve what you have or what you could have?
It may be that you are already in good control of positive self-talk, which is a great habit to have as a leader and to demonstrate to others. If you or a member of your team do have a habit of negative self-talk then have a go at this activity.
Activity:
Create a list of the negative self-talk you use
Ask others what negative things they hear you say about yourself
Now consider those statements, if you heard someone saying that about themselves, how would you feel hearing that?
What kinder, more compassionate wording could you use instead - write down those more compassionate statements
Practice using these new compassionate statements instead
Check in with yourself (or the person in your team) in a few weeks time to see how well that is going, are you breaking the negative habit? What impact is that change having on you?
See you in March!!
I hope you’ve found the topics and resources shared in this month’s Purple Sky Thinking for Leaders useful. I’d love to hear how you are using it and also if there are any topics that would be most helpful to you in future.
If you do have any feedback or ideas you’d like to share please do email me at: anwen@purpleskyconsulting.co.uk