Creating a Roadmap to Success for Emerging Leaders | Part One: Developing You March 13, 2022 by Belinda EganAwareness creates choice. As an emerging leader, you have the choice to develop your leadership skills in a way that allows you to grow personally, professionally, AND bring your team along with you. Over the course of these next three weeks, my goal is to give you the tools you need as a developing leader to create success for yourself and your organization. We will discuss the importance of implementing a development process, values, hands-on exercises, accountability, behaviors, and effective communication. In this first article, the focus is all on YOU. For people to look up to and follow you, you must know where you are going. Developing the skills to lead confidently, boldly, and wisely are often lacking in the first five years of a leadership role – not because of what you’re doing – but because organizations tend to overlook the importance of having an effective leadership development plan in place. Failure to have a plan can be catastrophic for an organization and yourself. A plan will not only save you and your organization valuable time, resources, and money, it will set you up to deal with failure, challenges, and opportunities in front of you. You will have a well-defined mission and a set of steps to get you there. Without an effective action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events. And without check-ins to reexamine the plan as events unfold, the executive has no way of knowing which events really matter and which are only noise.” -Peter F. Drucker Your job as a leader is too important to be polluted by the noise of unimportant details or ineffective delegation – and you need to have a system in place to evaluate your leadership strategy as new challenges present themselves. So, let’s get to work and put your plan on paper. A courageous, focused, and constructive plan that will give you the dynamic leadership skills you need to show up confidently, adapt to change, overcome challenges, and bring your team along with you. Here are a few key elements you will want to get started with. Creating Your Roadmap: Part One Your Values: Your values determine how you show up as a leader. They guide your decisions and actions, influence who you hire, and impact morale for your entire organization. Your values encompass your passions, talents, and strengths. By identifying your core values, you will set yourself and your team up for achieving big goals. Here are a few questions to think about in the process. What is most important to you deep down? How do you want to interact with others and yourself? What do you stand for? Your Personal Vision Statement: You should have a motive, beyond money or a title, for why you chose to step into a leadership role. What is your Why? Take the time to reflect on… Why did you take the leadership position? What is your motivation? What does leadership mean for you? Who do you want to lead? Your Mask: We all have a window from which we see the world. The window is the lens that tints, shades, and at times even warps our view. Your window is made up of many things; your life experiences, your past, your culture, your ethnicity, the nurturing you received (or, perhaps, lack thereof) when you were young. This is all about seeing your true self and acknowledging the masks you wear that might hold you back from your true potential. What do you see when you look in the mirror? What do you think people see when they look at you? Do both sides look the same or very different? I challenge you to take the time to reflect on each of these areas and how they might be affecting how you show up as a leader. I’ve done these exercises with hundreds of individuals, and the answers are never the same. We are all in different places in our journey. Recently, a tenured leader I worked with said that if only they had more development opportunities early on, it would’ve increased their confidence to deal with their team at a higher level, focusing on their growth and decision-making capabilities instead of putting out fires and dealing with the minor, everyday issues. An emerging leader I am working with found that their top values focused on themselves and not their team. None of this is bad or wrong – it’s about creating the awareness of what it takes to become a courageous leader and how continued development can create a culture of productivity and high engagement for yourself and your entire team. Take the first step by downloading my free interactive Values Guide to will help you define your top 5 values and how those will play a crucial role in your roadmap to success. –Belinda Egan PS. Next week for part two of this series will be the importance of implementing a development process for you and your organization. Download the FREE Guide!