Managing yourself is an essential component of effective leadership.
People often think that leadership is about getting people to report to you so you can manage their work. But they forget to manage their most important employee: themself.
Managers will spend time in 1:1s each week to walk through the top priorities of each of their people, and assess what is blocking them. But they don’t reflect on how to prioritize their own time, and consider what important work they’re not doing when they’re so busy taking care of everybody else.
This busyness is exacerbated by the behaviors we learned in the early part of our career: answer quickly, get the right answer, show your work, overdeliver on expectations. These become unconscious habits because they bring us success.
But as our scope grows, these automatic reactions now become a hindrance (and led to burnout in my case). Is quickly answering Slack messages more important than designing the long-term strategy and communicating it clearly? Likely not, and yet I have to regularly ask that question of new clients to get them to consciously make a different choice.
Making these intentional choices about how to spend our valuable time is the core of self-leadership. And when we can effectively lead ourselves to focus on impactful work, we will be more effective in leading others to do the same.
A few questions that might be helpful to remind you of this self-leadership orientation:
— Before taking on a new task, ask yourself “Is this the best use of my valuable time? What will I not get done if I commit to doing this?”
— Since many of those automatic reactions arise from defensiveness or insecurity, you might ask “What am I scared will happen if I don’t do this?” or “How does this serve the company for me to do this?”
What have you learned about managing yourself? Please share any tips in the comments!