Preparing Leaders

Hello, everybody. Just give it a couple minutes here for people to maybe join. Hope your Monday is going well. I had a long weekend. I went to a conference last Wednesday through Saturday, so I'm still feeling tired from all that socialization. I'm an introvert, so it was a lot of work. Hi. Welcome. Give it one more minute here about. Okay, so today we'll be talking about how to move up the leadership ranks. Not everything about it. There's a lot that goes into it, but kind of things that you can control.

I'm in IO psychology, so looking at the psychology background in it, we like to predict things. Prior research before kind of thought, cognitive ability, genetics, personality, these were the things that would predict people to be good leaders. But what was found out that IQ is, it might tell you that you're going to be good at your work, but it's not going to tell you that you're going to be good at managing people. So now people are looking at it completely differently. Let's go back to cognitive intelligence.

So if you want to move up the leadership ranks, yes, cognitive intelligence is going to help you get up there quickly. You're going to be able to do your job and do it effectively. But the issue with that, for you or for me or for anyone trying to become a leader, is that cognitive ability is like very dependent on your genetics and ages zero through five. So after five, your cognitive ability doesn't spike, it doesn't go up any more than kind of just a steady line. You can't increase it too much more than it already is.

Additionally, cognitive ability doesn't actually explain how effective the leader is. What's been found to show effective leadership is their ambition. Kind of like their career, their purpose, what motivates them to become a leader. This has been the new idea of how can we predict what a good leader will be? And it's that ambition has been shown to drive people up the leadership ranks. So how can you get a bigger, greater ambition? Find your ambition for leadership? Well, one of it. One of the ways to do that is emotional intelligence.

And a part of emotional intelligence is being able to self motivate yourself through emotions. That involves knowing the emotions that you're feeling, managing them, recognizing them, and then using them effectively. So I'll be talking about twelve areas of emotional intelligence. I'll only be talking about two of them today because twelve would probably take all afternoon, and I don't have time for that. And you probably don't have time for that either. But the emotional intelligence in a gist of it is, it's understanding, recognizing and managing one's emotions along with others.

Two aspects I'll be looking at is self awareness. And managing self awareness is, do you see yourself the same ways other people see you? So when you walk into a room, you might feel as a leader, you might feel, I have these people enjoy my meetings, and they like listening to me, but other people might not feel that way. Are you able to recognize that as well as managing emotions? And a lot of people think emotional intelligence involves deciding when to feel emotions or not feeling emotions, but it's actually recognizing the emotions and determining how you respond to these emotions.

Because everybody's going to feel emotions. It's inevitable. But how you respond to them is the deciding factor. So self awareness and ambition are key areas for leadership effectiveness. Being able to be a good leader. So what can you do today to improve your self awareness and become a better leader or be a better employee to your leader? Because I believe that every person is a leader. Whether it's leading yourself or leading a whole company, you're leading something. So what can you do today to become a better leader?

Leader? Start by noticing and having intention behind what you're doing during work. A good example of this I like is if you're going into a meeting, just take a minute, not even that long. It'll probably just be 30 seconds, and ask yourself, how do I feel right now and who do I want to be during this meeting? How do I want other people to see me during this meeting, and then how do I want them to feel after this meeting is over? A good example of this would be if you have to give feedback, constructive feedback, to an employee before going into the meeting, you might feel kind of on edge, a little upset because maybe there was a mistake that was made.

But recognizing that is the first step. Knowing that you feel those emotions can help you overcome them. So then ask yourself, who do I want to be during this meeting? What kind of leader do I want to be? Do I want to be that angry leader who yells or make them feel the same way I feel? Or do I want to be more of the charismatic leader? Do I want to motivate them? And that gets into that last question of, how do I want them to feel when the meeting is over. So if you're going to give constructive feedback, you want them to feel that you really care about them.

So being able to go into the meeting and knowing that you want to portray care for them and being able to display that and say that in your message when also giving that constructive feedback is important for a leader. So being able to change your leadership style based on the situation has been found to be now the number one indicator of effective leadership. So it's a little difficult to measure right now in people, but IO, psychology and all the nerds out here are testing different ways that we can start measuring it.

People in this situational leadership to be able to tell who can be effective leaders in the future. So it's not as much about a transformational leader, a charismatic leader, a compassionate leader. It's now about, can you display all of those in different situations? Can you be a visionary when leading the team meeting? Or can you be compassionate when somebody and your team needs that? It's being able to change and dictate your leadership style based on the situation. And it starts with self awareness, by knowing, going into the situation, this is who I have to be to portray a good message to my team.

So back to what you can do today. Start by having intention behind what you're doing. If you're going into a meeting, sit and think, how do I feel right now? Who do I want to be during this meeting, and how do I want the other person to feel? And you can do this with yourself. You can do this with a team. If you're going to a sales pitch, anything, that's how you can start. I'll talk more about situational leadership or versatile leadership or kind of authentic leadership next week, and then the week after that, I'll dive deeper into that example I just gave about when going into a meeting, think about these things.

I'll go deeper into that the week after that. So that's the plan for the next couple weeks for my lives. Keep it here on Cadre for the rest of the day. JC is on right after me at 1230 here. In about 20 minutes, we got Daryl R. Glaze talking about what's on your resume at five. If you want to check out the whole calendar, click on the little calendar icon right here on the app. I hope you have a great rest of your week here and I'll see you next time.