#🌱 #🟡 # What I do want as a leader ![[calendar-plus.svg]] <small>Oct 28, 2022</small> | ![[calendar-clock.svg]] <small>Jan 03, 2023</small> 🏷️ [[Leadership MOC]] *Ignatian Journal entry from October 20, 2020* ## Leading as a Maven Of the many [[Personality Assessments MOC|personality assessments]] that I have taken over the years, perhaps my favorite is one called the [[Sparketype Assessment]] (Good Life Project, n.d.), which identifies your Primary Sparketype as the "essential nature of work that fills you with meaning and lets you feel fully-expressed, alive with purpose and absorbed in flow ("sparked")." According to my results, I am a [[Maven]] - driven to learn with a perpetual curiosity about everything and everyone. For me it's not necessarily about what I "do" with my accumulated learning, although it's great if what I learn can be useful to others, the deeper driver is the quest to learn. [[It's all about the process, not the result]]. My leadership practice is part of that process and there are three things that I strive to do well: (a) facilitate the creation of a shared vision and strategic thinking; (b) develop relationships, internally and externally; and (c) encourage and empower individuals and groups to achieve their full potential. These align with my top three [[My Personal Core Values|personal core values]] of learning, belonging, and contribution. Facilitating a vision and strategic thinking is the aspect of my work that sparks my passion the most. I seek to "create a space in which the [[community of truth]] is practiced" (Palmer, 2017, p. 92) and where "[[truth]] is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline" (p. 106). I strive to be a facilitator because I believe individuals and organizations are interconnected, and only together can we discover and implement the best solutions to challenges so we can achieve our goals. Facilitation also allows me to live my value of learning, to be open and curious in seeking opportunities and experiences for development. Of course, to be successful in facilitating this kind of process requires an ability to build relationships with the individuals and groups I work with. It's also important to my value of belonging - I want to be connected and loyal to others and part of something greater than myself. I want people around me to know that they matter to me. I want to be the kind of leader they trust and can relate to. One of the ways I can build relationships in my leadership practice is by using a [[coaching]] style with individuals. By asking questions more than I give advice or direction I can get to know others, what matters to them, what their goals are, and help them discover their own truths and solutions. I can be that kind of leader by "building a habit of curiosity" (Bungay Stanier, 2017, p. 213), which is in line with my passion or learning. Employing a coaching and facilitative style of leadership will also help me in encouraging and empowering others to achieve their full potential. One of my goals is to convert followers into leaders by facilitating their growth (Carey, 1999). I believe this is the most effective way to sustain organizational development and succeed in achieving a shared vision. If an organization relies too heavily on a single leader to accomplish its goals they cannot be sustained when the leader is gone. That is why I aspire to empower people to face and effectively deal with change (Watt, 2009), so they can continue to be successful even when I am gone. It is also the best way for me to live my value of contribution - being of service to others as I deliver excellence and leadership. Building relationships, facilitating vision and strategic thinking and encouraging and empowering others are all fed by, and feed back into, my passion for the process of learning. While the results are not what's most important to me, I trust that I can effectively lead an organization or group to success by engaging in a process of learning and co-creation with those I work with. That is the kind of leader I want to be. ## Sources - [[The Coaching Habit - MBS 2017]] - [[Heraclitean Fire - Carey 1999]] - [Sparketype Assessment](https://sparketype.com/sparketest/) - [[The Courage to Teach - Palmer 2017]] - [[Facilitative Social Change Leadership Theory - Watt 2009]]