Summary

Personal Leadership and Decision-Making

After having a good idea of the different leadership styles, an individual must identify his/her own style and
learn about certain ways to enhance their personal leadership.

A common framework to do achieve effective personal leadership is by identifying personal goals, values and
ethical boundaries which highly influence an individual's leadership style.

Personal Leadership: Self-Awareness

In the first segment of this session, you learnt the following about self-awareness:

• Self-awareness is the ability to understand what truly motivates and guides a leader.

• A great degree of self-awareness can be experienced when a leader deals with people.

• Self-awareness ensures that a leader is able to manage social situations better, improving their
relationship with others.

• Self-awareness is also the leader’s ability to know when to say sorry if they make mistakes. The
focus should be on self-improvement.

You also looked at the principles/tenets of self-awareness. They are as follows:

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Finally, you looked at how self-awareness can enhance personal leadership through the following ways:

• A self-aware leader will understand the skill sets of all other members.

• A self-aware leader will help their team only when required while trusting them rest of the time.

• A leader will have full knowledge of when they must step in and provide guidance.

• Self-aware leaders become more socially aware of their surroundings.

• Self-aware leaders inspire and motivate others.

• Self-aware leaders become authentic and do not imitate others’ style of leadership.

Personal Leadership: Motivations

Motivations are the key-drivers for any individual. In this segment, you learnt about two types of motivations:

Personal Leadership: Ethical Boundaries

Ethical parameters define the boundary within which a leader can take decisions and determine their effect.
It becomes of critical importance for a leader to follow ethical principles at all times and encourage their
team members to do the same.

In the segment, you learnt that the ethical standards set by the leader will be the standards for the rest of
the firm. An effective leader must ensure that they do not fall prey to moral disengagement. Moral
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disengagement is a tendency to think the established rules or regulations do not apply to oneself and
disengages one from decisions that talk about right and wrong.

You also learnt about the following few causes for unethical decisions:

A few measures that can be taken by leaders to ensure ethical decision-making are as follows:

1. Ensure one displays correct behaviour.

2. Be a role model for the organisation.

3. Ensure that one’s behaviour reflects the organisation’s culture.

4. Verbalise ethics through actions.

5. Address small unethical problems.

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 Decision-Making: Role of Creativity

In this segment, you learnt that creativity is the ability to look at different variables in the environment and
create new emerging patterns. It is commonly known as sense-making.

Creativity is important for leaders for the following reasons:

Decision-Making: Role of Growth Mindset

In this segment, you learnt about the essentials of developing a growth mindset. Ideally, a growth mindset is
the lens through which a leader takes their decisions. It is one’s self-view and belief system. It also allows the
leader to acquire the right skill sets, competencies and attitudes which are all required to enhance their
performance.

You also learnt that a leader with a ‘growth mindset’ would have the following key characteristics:

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Finally, you learnt that a leader can develop a growth mindset in the following ways:

• Embracing change: It means to have the appetite to believe that routine and business as usual can be
discarded. New ways, new patterns are all right and welcoming.

• Becoming self-aware: It means learning about one’s motivation, desires, strengths and weaknesses. A
complete understanding of these would drive an individual in the right direction.

• Encouraging positive disruption: When combined with courage, the ability to disrupt and question
routine patterns will help an individual to think outside the box and embrace some alternative paths.

• Learning from failures: The motto should be ‘Experiment, fail fast, fail forward’.

• Focusing on keeping a growth mindset: Generating a growth mindset is a process, it's not a
destination. When an individual has achieved one level of developing a growth mindset, he/she needs
to move forward to achieve the next. It's a continuous ongoing process.

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 Decision-Making: Role of Lateral Thinking

In this segment, you learnt that as per lateral thinking, a problem or situation must be approached in a
different direction by finding unusual patterns.

In other words, it is often said that instead of approaching a problem head-on, look at the possible solutions
and have a reverse engineering mechanism of working backwards from the best solution.

After having a good idea of what lateral thinking means, you also learnt about a few ways/strategies that
leaders can adopt for lateral thinking. These are:

1. Generate alternatives or the ability to use concepts to breed new ideas

2. Sharpen your focus to improve your creative efforts. Remember the end goal that you want to achieve

3. Challenge and break free from the limits of accepted ways of operating

4. Use unconnected inputs to open new lines of thinking rather than question the approved methods

5. Move from a provocative statement to useful ideas

6. Select bright, new fresh ideas and put them into incubation

7. Develop ideas and shape them to fit the organisational situation. There is no innovation without
processing curiosity in the right direction.

Decision-Making: Role of Systems Thinking

In this segment, you learnt about how leaders use the systems thinking approach to make effective and fast
decisions. You learnt that:

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