I’ve just come back from an excellent training course that focusses on personal leadership. One of the exercises was to come up with a personal vision, that encompasses how you will be and live as a leader in the future.
Sounds easy? It turned out to be very very difficult for me, and somewhat difficult for other people in my group.
I did come away with pieces of a personal vision – I saw my team as successful in our work, and positive in the relationship we have with each other… but I also saw myself writing more, and frankly I don’t know how that’s going to happen in the short term given current workload and the rather turbulent environment in which I’m working.
I also came away with valuable learning, my 360 feedback showed me that there is a lot I am doing right as a leader (very good for my confidence!), some things to improve. The MBTI II was interesting – especially going into detail about how ‘extrovert’ behaviours might be received by introverts. As a very strong extrovert I learnt some tricks I can use to give others more space to speak in meetings, as one of my group members said “save to draft”.
In fact the group feedback was the most useful session, before it began the course leader talked about how in most cases the feedback would be 70% good – and asked us to receive it with that in mind. My group gave me feedback that was honest, insightful and useful; impressive since we’d only known each other five days.
I got a lot out of the whole week, and got a lot of energy from the classroom environment – the point where I’m now looking at how I can be in that environment more often. Perhaps as a group facilitator rather than a student. I can even see how that would bring the two threads of my personal vision together.
Image vision via pixabay
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