Experiences make you a leader
Let your experiences drive your evolution
I‘ve learnt an awful lot about myself in the last 6 years.
Particularly about myself as a person, my requirements for happiness and what I need to maintain equilibrium.
And, through destiny, luck or fate, whatever you want to call it, I’ve had the opportunity to navigate some intensive experiences that have shaped me profoundly, as well meet and work with some incredible people who, through tough periods as well as good, have driven my understanding of people.
Understanding people is the key to leadership. Which is why a good leader needs to understand themselves as well as those around them. They need to recognise their blind-spots as well as their strengths; be aware of their limitations as well as their potential. And they need to be willing to share the human side of themselves to drive growth in others.
“The human element in leadership is what inspires people.”
Loretta Malandro, Ph.D
This quote sums up exactly what I have discovered in my meandering journey through life, work and technology. It’s our human experience that inspires. This ability to show vulnerability and share mistakes made and lessons learnt is going to be what fortifies people when they are low, enables them to make mistakes without fear and evolve as leaders themselves.
But they need to lead by example.
I hope to do this in some small but meaningful way. In this article, we’ll wander into my journey and my experiences, how they drove my own personal evolution and look into some of the invaluable change inducing techniques I picked up along the way.
My own evolution
I don’t drink.
There are good reasons for that that I will not bore you with today, but the process taking me to my teetotaller state led me to the most raw and critical self evaluation I will most likely ever experience.
And, with that extreme plunge inward to unearth years of pain and hurt and confusion and frustration; with this unrestrained, no holes barred screening that I received at that time, there emerged a person who was clear.
Who knew at all costs what was acceptable and what was not, what was normal and what was not, what was quality and what was not, what was life and what was not.
- This person knew what her triggers were, so she could avoid them.
- This person understood what certain situations would mean for her psyche, so she could manage them.
- This person realised how she tended to react instinctively, so she learned how to assess and apply logic to ground her back to earth.
- This person understood when language was being used to manipulate her, so she learned how to cope and she learned how to converse to protect herself and gain control of the situation.
- This person understood when the build up of a situation would cause her to implode so she learned how to not only step away, but how to avoid getting there in the first place.
There’s a beautiful quote from Samuel Beckett who said:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett
You can apply these words to Scrum and Agile as well as you can apply it to life. It pays to fail if you learn from it.
And while I wouldn’t recommend alcohol abuse as a fast track course in personal development, I will give thanks for every single sip that got me there because a person emerged on the other side who knew intimately who she was, through deep and powerful introspection.
A person who emerged with solid tools to maintain an equilibrium. Maybe at that stage, I wasn’t a leader of a team. But I did lead myself out of chaos and it is by far and away my greatest achievement.
And it turns out that leadership translates. These skills translate. Your evolution can start immediately if you are happy to take the first step in the right direction. And you don’t need to take the scenic route like I did.
Applying this introspection to your teams
Leadership, whether its for a large team or simply yourself, is not going to take effect until you acknowledge your human flaws and address them, using them as the catalyst to make you ignite.
It always makes me laugh when I think back because at times, I honestly think working in my field gave me the tools to live my life better. This is the power of UX. You experience, gather data, reflect and then pivot based on feedback.
It works for technology as well as it works for humans and I love it because it just makes sense.
Find and fix your bugs, make a better product.
Find and address your flaws, become a better person.
My father used to love the metaphor of getting your hair cut, allowing you the rare opportunity to see the back of your head and used to comment how everyone who is too busy avoiding dealing with their shite needed the mirror to the back of the head to deal with their blind spots.
Your willingness to self reflect is the differentiator between you staying where you are and you rising to a stronger place, both personally and professionally.
Confronting your own blind spots as a person is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself as a person, or for your partner and family but also keep in mind how much this doubles as an incredible gift to bestow upon your business.
“Organisations at their core are a collection of people, who make decisions based on feeling…”
Simon Sinek
When you are unwilling to learn and explore areas outside of your remit and experience and comfort zone, you are not only limiting yourself, you are limiting your organization. True leadership is having the courage to not only look for the gaps in your skill sets and your own perceived flaws but seek to understand them from other people.
We can all say intellectually what we think we could work on to improve ourselves, but going a step further is facing those things that you haven’t realised are actually issues and you can only get that from directly asking those you work with to, respectfully, give this feedback.
Ask the question and let the answers come back, but think structurally.
State the issue.
State the consequence.
State the solution.
Be respectful.
Take an example:
“Every time you cut across me, saying ‘I know’, I feel like you’re not listening to what I want to say and that makes me think, Why bother?
Let me finish my thought and then respond.”
Hearing this kind of feedback is difficult. It can be honest, at times brutal and direct and while we may claim otherwise, we do not live in a society that loves being honest and direct all the time; we are in a society that prefers head down and muddle on.
With this feedback, your mind may react in several ways, from:
“Feck, I thought I was getting away with that…”
to the more common…
“Really, was that really causing such an issue…”
or…
“Is that seriously how they perceive me to be?”
But you are going to move past this discomfort, and it may be initially terribly uncomfortable or awkward, and move into the beautiful land of knowledge where your potential to grow and evolve lies.
You have to start looking on feedback as a gift. A chance to know areas you could work on, the awareness of the things you tend to do unintentionally that impede others work flow. Or, on the flip side, giving someone else feedback that is incredibly awkward, but may alleviate the difficult situations that seem impossible to ride out.
These are gifts that make you better as a worker and as a person. These are gifts that are forcing you to grow.
The result of a moment of awkwardness?
This awareness leads to knowledge and growth, as well as a chance of building a better rapport between you and your colleagues, who will see you putting yourself out there, respect your seeking to genuinely improve yourself and potentially, with the power of the ripple effect, will now in turn seek to know the same about themselves.
And there are simple ways to do this as a team. Whether you’re asking within a retrospective as part of scrum ceremonies, or simply one on one, ask three simple questions to get the ball rolling:
- What are my top three blind spots?
And what is their impact on you, the person who deals with them? - What are the top three blind spots of the team?
And what is their impact on the productivity in the team? - What can we do to avoid these blind spots being issues?
How can we make things better?
These are simple questions that lead you on to revelations and knowledge that could genuinely impact and benefit your company in ways you cannot imagine. The proof is in the pudding and it all comes from asking the right questions.
Asking the right questions
The power of asking the right question was a game changer for me. This is a technique, picked up through the audiobooks of Tony Robbins, that allowed me to actively take control over my state of mind and shift myself from self pity to practical, from frustration to solution. This can have a profound impact on how you live your day to day life. And it’s simply applied.
Reframing is seeing the current situation from a different perspective and is invaluable in problem solving, decision making and learning. It can help you more constructively move on from a situation in which you feel stuck or confused.
If you find yourself getting frustrated, if you find yourself in a mood, if you find yourself getting irritated by someone’s behaviour, drill down into the problem until you get the answer.
And be wary of your instinctive reactions.
If you ask an unhelpful question, like: “Why am I never able to get my point across?”, your negative headspace may instinctually reply with “Because you’re a bad communicator,” or “These people are stupid and can’t understand what I’m talking about…”
Hardly helpful and more likely to keep you in the negative space you’re trying to escape.
Whereas, if you were to reframe the question and ask something like: “What would help me get my thoughts across better? What would best resonate with this group?” All of a sudden, your brain is triggered into solution mode and is far more likely to find a more useful answer.
If you don’t get the answer right away, ask a better question. Reframe and ask again. No good? Reframe and ask again. Be the little five year old sitting in the back of the car, saying “Why, why, why?” but instead of why, reframe the narrative.
The aim of reframing is to shift your perspective to enable yourself to be more empowered to act. Sometimes, merely reframing one’s perspective on a situation can help people change how they feel about the situation as well as influence both how they’ll approach it and you in the future.
I am empowered by my experiences. I am living the happy life I currently live as a result of these experiences and despite all the hardships, painful moments and the hard learning that came from the journey to get here, I proudly honour, remember and am grateful for everything that got me to this point.
I can speak happily of my experiences because I know they have the power to instruct and have the power to lift people who feel like I felt a long time ago, or are dealing with difficult people or situations that don’t allow them to be their best version of themselves. I have been there, bought the T-shirt and went back for another. But introspection is a good healer.
My own sense of self confidence comes from knowing I survived every tricky situation and learned something from it. How I kept exploring my personality, my own needs for happiness, my quirks and actively understand the need to keep pushing this exploration. What I can say is that change is possible and I’ve lived it. And it doesn’t have to stop at you.
Change starts from you and trickles down through your example to those around you. It takes effort and an honest desire to achieve it but I swear, it is addictive. Don’t wait for it to just happen, instigate it.
Be the change that inspires the others.
