Leadership self-awareness starts long before you write a team charter or set out ways of working. It starts with knowing who you are and why you do what you do.
Biran, speaking on the One Life Coaching podcast, makes the point that this is always the first module in any leadership development programme she designs. She says the first module always covers self-awareness. What are my strengths, what are my development areas, what do I value, who am I as a leader, and why am I here.
Why the team’s rules need to start with your why
Biran’s argument is that even a team of two has values and ways of working. Whatever a leader sets, whatever boundaries or expectations they build with their team, needs to be aligned with their own why and their own sense of who they are. Skip that step and you end up building structures that don’t hold, because they were never anchored to anything in the first place.
This is the same territory we explored in our piece on stepping into a new leadership role, where self-awareness in the first 90 days makes the difference between reacting to a new job and actually leading it. The pattern is the same. The external stuff, the systems, the rules, the culture, only works if it’s built on something you actually understand about yourself first.
What happens without it
Biran is direct about the stakes. If you can’t find meaning in your own role, you can’t talk about sustainable high performance. That’s not a soft point about job satisfaction. It’s a practical one. A leader who hasn’t worked out their own purpose will struggle to set boundaries that hold, values that mean anything, or a team culture that isn’t just borrowed from somewhere else.
For anyone leading a team, however small, it’s worth pausing on your own leadership self-awareness before setting the next rule or boundary for someone else.
Take ten minutes this week to write down your own why as a leader, and check whether the ways of working you’ve set for your team actually align with it.
Be sure to check out more from Biran at:
Biran’s Website: Biran’s website
Biran’s LinkedIn: Biran’s LinkedIn
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