As you seek to enhance your effectiveness, it's important to look back on your life and understand how key experiences, people, and events have impacted your habits and patterns of thinking.

Reflect on three time periods:

1. The past 1-3 years.
2. When you transitioned from school into the workplace.
3. Your earlier years.

How have these experiences, people, and events shaped your thinking? How do they impact how you "show up" in the workplace?

“Are leaders born?”

This is an interesting question that I am often asked in the leadership development programs we run at 5.12 Solutions.

We believe that leadership isn’t about being charismatic and it’s not about some magical qualities that are bestowed upon you at birth. And you don’t have to go through special forces training as a rite of passage. Leadership is about employing key skills and behaviors on a consistent basis.

And those skills and behaviors can be learned.

Do your conversations typically start with "can" or "can't?"

One generates dialogue. The other shuts it down.

If you answered "it depends," you fall into the "can't" category.

As you build your capacities as a leader it is critically important to enhance your level of self-awareness. Self-awareness is often equated to emotional intelligence. It can also be seen as deepening your understanding of how your behaviors impact others and how you are impacted by other people.

Why would you want to deepen your level of awareness? After all, your "I am what I am" attitude has worked well for you.

Deepening your self awareness will enable you to:

Where do You Go From Here?

This series of posts started out with the question, "Are leaders born?"

Our response has been "No." Leadership can be learned. We can learn the key competencies and capacities to elevate our effectiveness.

Here are some recommended next steps to guide your path forward.

Principle 1: Do not avoid the difficult conversations. You are just doing a disservice to your team member, the team as a whole, and the organization. And, you are losing credibility in the eyes of others on the team because they see you avoiding the conversation.

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Principle 2: Maintain or enhance your team member’s self –esteem. Everything we do as leaders can be done in such as way as to not marginalize our people.

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Everything DiSC Work of Leaders(TM) Profile

Using the framework of Vision, Alignment, and Execution, Work of Leaders encourages leaders to understand their own leadership behaviors and how they impact their effectiveness. Rich, compelling narrative adds depth to the data and strong visuals support the learning process by illustrating key messages.

Integrate the profile into your leadership development programs.

One of the challenges that senior leadership teams face is what I call an "interesting duality."

On on hand, a senior leader is often responsible for a functional unit or team within an organization. On the other hand, they are asked to be on a team with other leaders - usually headed by a Director, VP, or CEO.

Here are 4 real-life excuses that will scare off a retail customer every time.

Excuse One: “It’s our policy.”

Ah, the dreaded fallback position from employees and organizations that have no clue about what the customer needs. Smells like complacency to me. In other words, corporate has my hands tied and I can’t do anything for you.

Excuse Two: “My manager is on vacation for the next week.”

This seriously happened to me. Right after excuse number 1. Sounds a lot like "my dog ate my homework."

Recognition in the workplace is a critical element toward creating a cohesive team.  So, the next several posts will deal with the topic.

In this post we'll start with the business case - the "why" - for recognition.