What are the best ways to enhance leadership potential and performance?

It starts with a strong sense of self-awareness and being consciously driven with values based actions and decisions. Knowing your true strengths and weaknesses will help in robust decision making, planning and strategic execution of the tasks. Coaching, feedback and mentoring are great tools to enhance self and others potential. You've got to be quite intentional about diagnosing your skills and strengths so that you can vision out to build a leadership pipeline because a leaders job to create more and leaders of a better version.

Assessing your strengths and weaknesses is crucial in enhancing your leadership potential and performance. Here are some of the best ways to conduct such an assessment: 1. Self-reflection 2. Feedback from others 3. Leadership assessments 4. 360-degree Evaluation 5. Continuous learning and development: 6. SWOT analysis 7. Set goals and create an action plan: Remember that leadership development is a continuous journey. Regularly assessing your strengths and weaknesses, setting goals, and actively working on self-improvement can enhance your leadership potential and performance.

Expanding your horizons and evaluating your strengths and weaknesses can be achieved by exploring new fields and collaborating with diverse teams. Consider offering your support to other departments, taking on challenging tasks, volunteering with community service groups, or participating in team sports like football. By venturing beyond your routine work, you gain fresh perspectives, develop new skills, and broaden your experiences. Engaging with different people and facing diverse challenges will enhance your self-awareness, enabling you to identify areas where you excel and areas where you can further improve. Embracing these opportunities for growth and learning will ultimately contribute to your personal and professional development.

I have to say that being in a constant state of building new and trustworthy relationships will make it easier for the leader to envision what is beyond the moment through the different perspectives from differently capable individuals.

Before you embrace your team’s potential, you must first embrace your own potential. As a leader of a team, we all want our people (or we should all want our people) to be the best they can be, and go the extra mile for us and the team. However, if we are expecting this of our team, then we should be expecting the same from ourselves and leading by example.

If you don’t have awareness, then you don’t know that you don’t have awareness. If you can’t see what you need to have awareness of, then you don’t know that you can’t see what you need to have awareness of. To grow to your full potential, you must have awareness. How do you raise your awareness? By becoming a highly effective leader, there are a lot of things that you need to be aware of, and one of those things is to have awareness. When it comes to the differences between a low performing leader and a highly effective leader, one of those differences is how aware they are. A highly effective leader’s awareness level must be higher.

Seeking out mentors who can teach you key leadership aspects is imperative. If you latch on to the right mentor your career can develop exponentially. Not every mentor is the right fit as well. You have to internally interview them to ensure they align with your leadership principles. If they do then you can learn from their experience. Look around you and observe the different leadership principles used inside and outside the company. Use what works and delete what doesn’t. Also, leverage your peers and friends. A lot can be learned by casual conversations with folks in your network.

Digital transformation enables you to learn from others by accessing global networks, engaging in online communities, participating in webinars and virtual events, leveraging social media and blogs, engaging in online mentoring and coaching, accessing digital learning resources, analyzing case studies and success stories, and participating in virtual mastermind groups. These digital avenues provide leaders with opportunities to connect with peers, gain insights from industry experts, access valuable resources, and learn from the experiences of others.

A discerning leader is always poised for learning. Sometimes the insights come from a book, at other times from a junior colleague, or even an innocent game of children in the park. A readiness to learn is one of the most pivotal attributes of a value-driven leader. They understand that each lesson not only deepens their grasp of prior knowledge but also opens new doors for comprehending emerging challenges.

Keep working on yourself in both the competency and character areas. Focus on one at a time. Competency is what you can do and character is who you are. They must work in harmony. If you can do that, then your level of awareness will be rising on a daily basis.

One way I have personally observed, and benefitted from, is volunteering. This provides an opprtunity to not only learn new areas that you can grow into but experience and practice new things. For example, I started volunteering in a youth organization many years ago. I was eventually placed in positions of leadership. I enjoyed it so much that I actively seek higher level leadership positions in the current organization I volunteer in. It was such an interest of mine that my doctoral dissertation was focused on youth leadership development.

Highly effective leaders take action every day with their development and personal growth. They are also constantly seeking response and feedback from their leaders and team on how they are doing. Highly effective leaders have very high levels of self-awareness, but there are times when they can’t see everything. So feedback from their team helps them in the areas they can’t see for themselves.

As you learn how to be a leader, dont be afraid to ask for advise and feedback. You will not truly know how you are doing unless you hear from those you are leading. Granted, you cannot make everyone happy 100% of the time but you can receive good information by just conducting an after action review of not only the activity but of your leadership. Take the feedback as a learning opportunity and not personally. Ask what you could have done better and what decisions would they have made in the situation. Those feedbacks can potentially provide you ideas of what to do, or not do, next time.

Regardless where you are in your journey, be sure to have at least one trusted mentor. One who spends more time asking questions and listening is better than one spouting advice all the time!

Many people approach leadership development like getting into shape before a beach vacation. There’s a big flurry of activity as they sign up for a class at the gym, then nothing happens for another year. That’s leadership development by intervention. Your leadership development program should be fully integrated into the organization and its operations, with the same focus and discipline you apply to strategic planning and execution. Reflecting to feedback and adapting as you go is key to leading effectively and empowering the leaders of tomorrow.

Don’t dwell on your past, reflect on your past. Understand the mistakes that you have made in the past and learn the lessons from those mistakes. Dwelling on the past will stop you from moving forward in life. If we reflect and learn, then we can keep striving towards our vision for the future.

Leadership development is a journey, not a destination. It requires consistent effort, a willingness to learn, and a commitment to growth. Each step you take toward enhancing your leadership potential will contribute to your long-term success as a leader.

A great way to grow is by seeking feedback and adapting/reflecting based on that feedback. There are times when the feedback you receive may not match your view of yourself, and those are some of the best times to reflect upon - regardless of how we see ourselves, we should be aware of how we come across to others if we want to grow, especially in a leadership capacity. This holds true for positive and constructive feedback...there is always more to learn about yourself!

Create an environment with excellent leadership role models. It is hard to be 'different'. Most leadership development fails as few senior leaders walk the walk. We hare hugely influenced by our leaders, and how they behave. They set the tone. Any cognitive dissonance between what you are asking leaders to do, and what their boss does and tolerates and you have an uphill battle.

As a leader, everything will become easier and more meaningful when you determine your purpose. Having a purpose, especially articulated as a purpose statement, will guide you in making the right decisions, prioritizing your time and energy, and extracting valuable lessons from each experience and mistake.

Even very experienced leaders can significantly improve their potential and performance sharpening FOUR key skills: 1. The 5 domains of Emotional Intelligence. Read the HBR article "What People (Still) Get Wrong about Emotional Intelligence" 2. The main elements of Assertive Communication (expressing you rational and emotional arguments in a clear and respectful way) Go to the Mayo Clinic site and search "Being Assertive: Reduce Stress Communicate Better" 3. Active Listening.Become a better listener studying the HBR YouTube video The Art of Active Listening 4. Effective Teamwork. This is a complex issue. Two specific ways to promote effective teamwork are avoiding The Abilene Paradox and GroupThink signals. Google them to learn the details

Leadership should not be 'all said' but 'not done'. To enhance leadership potential and performance we must lead by example: 🔆 Make Integrity and honesty your core leadership principle. 🔆 Practice empathy 🔆 Listen 🔆 Think long term. Be a visionary 🔆 Be accountable 🔆 Delegate 🔆 Don't shy away from tough decisions 🔆 Communicate 🔆 Learn and improve 🔆 Smile 🔆 Celebrate other's success