Starting a Leadership Journey

culled from:http://tweakyourbiz.com

I just wanted to follow on a few of the threads that resonated with me from the comments posted against my last post.

The Covey analogy, posted by Elaine, made me reflect on who my own persona in the story was likely to be i.e. am I a problem solver, a manager or a leader?

Like many people I initially succeeded in work by developing excellent technical problem solving skills, in my case it was IT, but don’t think the domain makes too much difference.  This in turn lead to a level of seniority as these skills enabled me to effectively solve problems and guide others through situations where I already had experience.  Over time I also gained a greater understanding of the underlying processes, human element and organisational dynamics that enabled a move more towards general management i.e. overseeing the sharpening of the machetes.

However of late a little voice has been saying something in the background, which to be honest is getting louder and louder and sounds very much like ‘are you sure you want to be in this jungle?’

I realise that I’m only recently beginning to explore and listen to my internal ‘authentic’ voice – historically I have primarily placed my faith in my intellectual capabilities, confident in the knowledge that they have served we well in the past and are generally sufficient to meet the challenge at hand.   But I need to move on to another level, if I want to be able to lead and manage in different ways.  I recognise that I’ve been struggling to break away from my comfort zone of being a ‘technical’ manager to becoming a different type of leader, which I believe is required at the level that I want to work at.  I’m not talking about dropping the technical skills but really about developing some new ones to accompany them.

So is this possible? Can new leadership skills be learned? Two quotes jump out at me from Kouzes & Posner:

“The quest for leadership is first an inner quest to discover who you are.”

“If you don’t find your authentic voice, you’ll end up with a vocabulary that belongs to someone else.”

Don’t worry there won’t be too much soul searching! but I now see this blog as one way to try and work through this challenge i.e. what type of leader do I want to be? How do I get there?

Thoughts?