Developing Self-Leadership Competencies

Leadership competencies are usually seen as the ability to influence others to reach individual or shared goals. However, self-leadership competencies can help us to reach our goals through self-motivation and self-direction (Neck & Manz, 2010). Similarly, Bryant & Kazan (2012), authors of the book How to Become a More Successful, Efficient, and Effective Leader from the Inside Out, define self-leadership as the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling, and actions towards your objectives. Being a self-leader means serving as captain of one's own life, conducting ourselves toward our north. The authors also found that individuals who train their self-leadership skills can increase their cognitive performance and job satisfaction and show a more positive attitude (Neck & Manz, 1996).

How Can Self-leadership Impact My Life?

A good first step to becoming a good leader is to start with yourself, putting yourself at the center of your leadership. This implies developing a "sense of who you are, what you can do, where you are going coupled with the ability the influence your communication, emotions and behaviors on the way to getting there" (Browning, 2018). Self-leadership consists of personal behavioral and cognitive strategies that enhance our emotional intelligence by strengthening self-awareness to optimize our effectiveness.

How Can I Develop Self-leadership Competencies?

Smith (2000) introduces the R.E.A.L inner leadership model to explain the competencies development in the self-leadership area:

• Recognizing yourself
• Exploring your mindset
• Actualizing your change progress
• Leading yourself where you want and leading others.

According to Manz and Neck (2010), self-leadership development focuses on three major sets of strategies that are related to how we regulate ourselves to keep or improve our effectiveness:

1. Behavioral-focused strategies encourage positive and desirable behaviors that lead us to our goals and reduce negative behaviors that make our path harder.
2. Natural reward strategies help create a positive feeling of competence and determination, which motivates us to reach our goals.
3. Constructive thought pattern strategies help construct a positive mindset with constructive ways of thinking that impact your performance.

Tips for How to Develop Self-leadership Competencies

We adapted a list of tips reported in the literature (Manz, 1983; Smith, 2000; Manz and Neck, 2010) and summarized it according to Manz and Neck's (2010) three major sets of self-leadership development strategies:

Behavior-focused strategies

• Self-Observation: Recognize your attitudes, emotions, feelings to increase self-awareness about when and why you act in a particular way. It will provide you information on your current behavior and performance levels.

Natural reward strategies

• Self-goal setting: establish behavioral objectives for diverse scenarios. For example, set one hour of distract-less time to work every day.
• Self-reward: it can be intangible, such as feeling proud of yourself or taking a vacation after a milestone, or something tangible as buying a desirable object when you complete a task. Establish a proportional reward system to reward yourself each time you complete a goal.

Constructive thought pattern strategies

• Self-control: Unforeseen circumstances will arise in different scenarios; expect the unexpected and anticipate your response to challenges.
• Self-management: Rate your emotions and reactions on a 10-point scale of severity and reflect on alternative strategies you can use to adapt your reaction to the context next time.

Resources

Browning, M. (2018). Self-leadership: Why it matters. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 9(2), 14-18.

Bryant, A., & Kazan, A. L. (2012). Self-leadership: how to become a more successful, efficient, and effective leader from the inside out. McGraw Hill Professional.

Manz, C.C. (1983), The Art of Self-Leadership: Strategies for Personal Effectiveness in your Life and Work, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ

Neck, C. P., & Manz, C. C. (2010). Mastering self-leadership: Empowering yourself for personal excellence. Pearson.

Smith, S. (2000). Inner leadership: Realize your self-leading potential. London: Nicholas Brealey.