Understand who you are as a leader.

Your leadership style is at play inside and outside the office.

In this two-part series, we will explore how it can be helpful to understand who you are as a leader. Although maintaining a separate “work-self” and “personal-self” is possible, it may be more advantageous to understand how your leadership style can add value in both environments. More often than not, those boundaries tend to blend together.

In any usual year, February is one of my favorite months.

I’m a huge American football fan, and the football calendar culminates with Superbowl Sunday. In addition to Valentine’s Day (as a hopeless romantic), the month also includes birthday celebrations for my mother and sister. 

But this year provided a difficult February to fall in love with. An ordinary day in the middle of this past February changed my life.

I walked into my daughter’s bathroom to find her unresponsive on the floor. After being airlifted to the nearest children’s hospital and a five-day stay, her parting gift was a type 1 diabetes diagnosis. Now, this diagnosis was far better than the fears that hit when I found her on the floor. Our lives haven’t been nor will ever be the same.

Can clarity in your leadership style be helpful outside of the office?

In these moments, I found myself leaning on what I knew about myself as a leader to navigate some challenging days. You’ll hear me say we all have superpowers. Mine is the ability to connect with people. 

I’ve never met a stranger. It’s my belief that we’re all better together, and I strive to create an environment that inspires others to take risks and grow. Today, I realize this had much to do with my success driving business transformation at a Fortune 100 company.

To unlock my superpowers, I need an environment where people are friendly and direct in their communication, where there’s plenty for me to do, where situations are objective and rational, and when there are clear cut decisions to be made. When I don’t get this, I can become insensitive, restless, and impulsive.

In the moment when my daughter was unconscious, incoherent, and the medical staff had no definitive answer but plenty of strong hypotheses, I knew it would be easy for my stress behavior to emerge. That wouldn’t be of any help to anyone. When security folks were called to a nearby room to respond to another family’s “passionate” staff interaction, I knew my theory was validated. 

Lesson 1: Learn to recognize when your best self isn’t present.

In the first 24 hours, my demeanor was either entirely friendly or entirely in tears. Those tears were a natural byproduct of stress but were also a signal of my fight to contain my stress behavior. I’m familiar with that version of me and it wouldn’t be helpful for any of us. But how do we pull ourselves out of stress behavior while in a stressful situation? Well, knowing ourselves is key.

You’ve been you this whole time. In fact, nobody’s been around you more than you. But unless you’ve been walking around with a mirror, you’re only familiar with the person you’ve imagined of yourself.

We get a clearer picture of who we are to others and who we are in different situations when we look for an objective view. We’ll do best to avoid biases, filters, or lenses that often validate or challenge the things we believe about ourselves. I believe and advocate for the results of the Birkman Method, one of several leadership profile assessment tools. You’ll find that proven, statistical models can give you an entirely new, more objective view of yourself that you’ll also find very familiar – and likely more honest. 

Lesson 2: Learn how to summon your best self.

In the second 24 hours, I decided there was action to taken. I’d been praying and thinking. While under stress, both are hard, but I believe both are prudent. I was reminded of Stephen Covey’s “Circle of Concern versus Circle of Influence” model. 

Let me share it with you. In short, you could have interest in a lot of things. In some things, you can directly influence the outcome. In others, you can’t. Decide which it is and move on. In this case, I was very much interested in the work to find a diagnosis, but even a keen interest wasn’t going to lead to a quicker diagnosis. 

You might’ve heard, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Well, when it’s you that gets punched in the face, it’s hard to apply the medicine too. Getting out of that situation will have the same stages for me as for you. First, awareness. Then, panic. Now, action.

I wondered, if I were my client, what would I recommend to myself? And that was my “ah ha” moment!

I took my own medicine and watched my own content, “Managing Stress Before It Manages You.” Even as a trained executive coach and an accredited International Coaching Federation Coach, I still needed someone to tell me I could get out of the rut made by this tough situation. 

Although I couldn’t do the medical staff’s job, I could change the way I was feeling. And I set out to do just that.

Lesson 3: Life is going to life. Learn to navigate yourself away from stuck.

With this change of focus, I became more inquisitive with the medical staff and pivoted to ask direct questions. That gave me clarity. I could see how they were working to determine the correct diagnosis. I become more intentional with my requests to family members. I also realized I needed some air. I left the building and ran an errand. I needed to focus, and I allowed myself to find the right space to do that.

It wasn’t long before my daughter started to come out of the fog – by the grace of God. And good timing too, because by that point I was in a much better place. 

Lesson 4: If you’re learning, so are others.

Her words were limited, but she recognized me. She knew where she was. Had she heard her diagnosis correctly? Was she faced with diabetes? I quickly – but all too reluctantly – realized she was going through the same stages in her mind. First, awareness. Then, panic.

It was a reminder. As we have space, watch out for others. We’re all learning, and we can help the next generation learn this sooner. Imagine learning the power that lies in knowing ourselves – and learning it much sooner than we did.

What’s next?

In the next blog, I’ll explore how understanding who you are is more than having an acute view of your leadership style. I'll also share some of the intricacies I’ve navigated through diabetes education and her discharge.