Intimate Leadership Begins with an Accurate Self-Image

In my blog post Don’t Cut Yourself with Your Double-Edged Sword, I write about how your leadership assets can also work as liabilities. I advised you to balance the emphasis you put on driving accountability versus motivating engagement based on how you are perceived by your employees.

But before you decide what behavior you need to dial up or down, you need to become keenly, intimately and accurately aware of how you behave.

Accurate Awareness

Becoming keenly aware is the easy part. Accuracy is the hard part. It’s difficult enough sometimes to develop an accurate picture of what we look like, much less of how we affect others.

Who could be more perceptive than an artist such as Vincent van Gogh. Yet do you really think he looked like the portraits he painted of himself?

Of course, he was showing us more than what he actually looked like externally. He aimed to leave an impression of what tormented him inside as well. Do you think you have received the impression he was after? Or do we all receive a somewhat unique impression?

It’s easy to convince yourself that you know how your behavior affects people around you—your employees, peers, and manager. You may even have a fairly accurate idea. But unless you let an outside party take an objective measurement of your impact on others, you risk working with inaccurate information.

That’s why every CoachQuest Leader-as-Coach Workshop begins with a Leadership Attraction Profile. It tells you exactly how others—employees, peers, and manager—are affected by your behavior.

We are all concerned about our image and what others see as our value, and it’s right to be proud of our qualities. Intimate leaders, however, don’t make assumptions about the impressions they make. Intimately aware of their qualities and their shortcomings, they know how to adjust their behavior accordingly. Intimately aware of how others perceive their behavior, they also consider and incorporate the perceptions of others into their self-image.

CoachQuest grads tell me the results of their Leadership Attraction Profiles are not only eye-opening, but that armed with such an accurate idea of how they affect others, they have begun to make progress as more effective leaders. As an added bonus, they also praise the way clearer self-perception has helped them in their personal lives.

In our next workshop, leaders like you will become keenly and accurately aware of how they affect the world and adjust their behavior in order achieve the results they desire. If you’d like to join us, register here, today.

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