Unlocking a Heart for Leadership
This is a multi-part series of excerpts from Unlocking a Heart for Leadership, a soon to be released book by Tim Schneider. This book and series examines the powerful methods to add heart based (affective/feeling) approaches to your leadership and life. An unlocked heart is the third facet of full leadership and personal realization.
“A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination” Nelson Mandela
The Trinity of Leadership Success
One of the first questions that is often asked is why. Why does heart matter? What difference does my heart make if I am using the right skills and competencies and achieving a certain level of success?
And those are very fair questions.
The heart of a leader completes the trinity of leadership success, potential and full actualization of ability. Consider three circles, the first circle contains your competencies and skills. The most important of those competencies include communication, team member engagement, coaching, self-mastery and empowerment. Also among them are decision making, innovation and change, strategic planning, relationships and external management and courage and risk. Within each competency, there are critical skills to master as well. These competencies and supporting skills, when mastered and used consistently will lead you to a tremendous level of success just on their own.
Developing the use of competencies and skills is a cognitive or thinking processed piece of learning. It is developed through the engagement of intellectual capacity and stored in process, mind memory. The learning occurs from reading, seeing, doing and reinforced by the successes associated with the application of those skills. Your mind and memory drives the use of competencies and skills when not combined with other elements of success.
The second circle is the environment in which you operate. No successful person or leader can truly actualize their abilities and talents without a supporting and supportive environment. Within this circle are the organizational and environmental competencies of providing opportunity, valuing people, providing of needs, creating opportunity for growth and providing feedback to people. This type of environment will allow leaders to fully utilized, in a supporting climate, their abilities and talents. Together, with competencies, this creates a powerful combination for potential success.
But wait. That’s not all.
The third circle becomes the final driving piece of personal and leadership success. It is within that circle that the power of your emotions, heart and beliefs can be managed and unleashed. The heart, soul and emotional composition of a leader will drive beliefs which, in-turn, drive actions and behaviors. This can be viewed in a variety of ways including another circular view of your emotions and heart are at the core of who you are, your beliefs are driven by that emotional composition and your emotions then create the reality of behaviors and application of skills in all situations.
In the simplest of analogies, you are upset, your attitude reflects that. Your outward behaviors will then become a projection of that attitude and belief set. Conversely, if you are happy, your beliefs and attitude will be upbeat and positive. The outward behaviors driven by this will be much more positive in nature. You will smile, you will encourage, you will provide positive feedback, but only if your heart is in the right place.
Another superpower associated with leadership heart is the ability to drive sustained positive competencies and skills. Quite bluntly, anyone can memorize a skill or change a habit temporarily. We all do that. To sustain long-term desired behaviors, alignment with attitudes and belief and ultimately, emotional composition and heart must occur.
Consider for a moment that we could all quickly learn scales and a simple tune on a piano. All of that is cognitive learning and we will have this knocked down in 15 minutes. But to continue to play that music, expand the selection, execute with passion and achieve great musical results, your heart must be into it and belief in the outcome must be present. Without those, the song will sound mechanical and interest will wane quickly.
With alignment of heart, attitude and actions, any leader and any person becomes unstoppable.
Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years. He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.
He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.
