How beliefs can put limits on leadership

There are probably about 136 different definitions of leadership in "the literature" and another three hundred million in people's heads. All of them, in some way, are influenced by belief systems: national or religious belief systems, family belief systems and unconscious personal belief systems. At the national level we know that leadership in Japan calls for qualities that may not always be needed in the United States or France, and vice versa.

At the level of the individual who has been designated, or who has chosen to be, leader qualms about the adequacy or inadequacy of his or her leadership practice usually come from the feeling that personal thought patterns and habits are limiting day-to-day effectiveness and efficiency.

Andy Smith has a useful article on his emotional intelligence blog (one of many useful articles, in fact) that recounts his personal experience in dealing with a belief system that imposed limits on the leader he was coaching, a person who had been promoted to be the boss of former colleagues, probably one of the toughest challenges any manager can be confronted with.

Excerpt:

"Last week I had a first coaching session with the Managing Director of a medium-sized company. Although he had a long and successful track record as Operations Director, and had a wealth of experience and an MBA under his belt, he was fairly new in the MD role, and had doubts about his ability to lead.

In the course of our conversation he described various examples of how he had made a difference to staff at more junior levels. I was impressed by how neatly he had created the conditions where staff could come up with necessary adaptations to changes in the marketplace themselves, ending up where the business needed them to be with far less resistance than if he had tried to impose the same changes from above.

Leading people at a more senior level was a different story. Specifically, his doubts were around how he could lead his fellow directors - the guys who not long before had been his colleagues. 'How can I tell the Sales Director what to do?' he asked. 'I don't know anything about sales.'"

Read the rest of Andy's blog post at:

How Limiting Beliefs Can Affect Your Leadership - Coaching Leaders Blog - Coaching Leaders: NLP, Coaching, Appreciative Inquiry, Emotional Intelligence

Related articles

• How Does the Quality of Leadership Impact Employee Motivation? (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
• Emotional Intelligence - The Making of a Brilliant Leader (socyberty.com)
• Why some leaders are more talented (psychologytoday.com)