How to Know If You’re a Good Leader (or Parent or Teammate or Friend)
Category: Blog
April 8, 2022 | Mark Altman
Do you ever find yourself wondering: Was I a good leader today? Was I a good parent? Was I a good teammate? Was I a good friend?
Without a clear way to evaluate the diverse roles we play in our lives, we often default to the negative, find flaws, and beat ourselves up for where we perceive we failed. Our philosophy at MindsetGo is that we don’t allow our clients to criticize themselves unless they have a clear set of criteria to evaluate their performance whether it be personally or professionally.
The way we coach people to overcome this challenge is to develop a variety of success templates. A success template removes ambiguity from the equation, allows you to clearly recognize what you did well, and offers clear guidance to improve next time. It focuses less on outcomes and more on recognizing the habits and behaviors you can control and influence in any of your personal or professional roles.
Take performance conversations for example. As a leader, to date, your evaluation of performance conversations has likely been: the conversation was a success if the person immediately changed their behavior and unsuccessful if they didn’t.
But what if you instead evaluated the conversation using our MindsetGo Four Communication Ingredients success template?
- Was my word choice compassionate, respectful, and kind?
- Was my tone curious and empathetic?
- Was my body language positive and open?
- Did I listen to understand, rather than respond?
- Did I maintain the four ingredients throughout the conversation?
This template provides a benchmark for assessing your behavior around word choice, tone, body language, and listening, rather than the response of your employee. By improving these ingredients, you will be better able to influence your employee’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.
If you’re committed to building more self-awareness around your ability to become a confident and effective communicator, email us at info@mindsetgo.com and we’ll share our Situational Awareness Journal, a powerful tool we use to empower clients to start and sustain their habits through incremental growth.
Enjoy this post? Contact us at MindsetGo to empower your leaders and teams to build confidence, develop skills, and shift mindsets and habits for lasting change.