I recently participated in a discussion about ”Discovering Your Leadership Edge”. That got me thinking about how one could not only discover, but sharpen or enhance their leadership edge. These are some lessons I have learned from my recent reads of books, blogs podcasts and more.
Here are the 5 ways:
(1) By focusing your energy on the right things – or the Energy edge
(2) Maintaining good physical health or The Physical Edge
(3) Keeping your mental faculties sharp or The Mental Edge
(4) Consistently delivering value to those around you or The Value Edge
5) Finally, building robust social relationships or The Social Edge.
Here are some specific ideas to enhance your leadership edge in each of those areas. Now, let’s start with the Energy Edge.
(1) Examine a day in your life by looking at your calendar. Invariably you will notice is that there are 3 kinds of events.
– Energy Creating – Meditation, Running, in-person meetings, Learning
– Energy Neutral – Team meetings – some meetings are good but they are so-so
– Energy Depleting – Meetings without a specific agenda or outcomes;
Focus on those activities or events that create energy; See if you can delegate some of the Energy Depleting activities if you cannot completely avoid them;
Next, let’s examine the Physical Edge
- To maintain and grow your leadership edge, your physical health is an important part of the equation.
- To enhance your physical edge, move at least 30 minutes a day
- Increases your energy, Boost your mood, Improves Sleep quality and reduces the risk of cognitive decline
If you are struggling to get your 30 minutes in a day to get your physical edge, here are a few ideas for you.. How about walking meetings; Maybe get one of those under-the-desk treadmills or a stationary bike, Do weights, etc,
Next is one of the most important areas we will discuss called the Mental Edge….
As business leaders we face unpredictable, stressful situations every single day. What do you do to mentally prepare for situations like that? Well I am going to share with you a couple of my secrets to give you the mental edge – Two techniques that I want to share with you are Meditation and Mindful breathing. Over the last year, I started meditating regularly and I also do box breathing and they have made a big difference in my mental fitness
One of my most favorite topics for leadership is that of creating value, or The Value Edge. The mantra is Create Value. Receive Value.. “The only way to build value for yourself by creating value for others”. If you look around you at the most successful leaders, they all created so much value for their employees, their bosses, their peers, their customers, investors and they received a fraction of the value for themselves.
Finally, the Social Edge…Did you know that on the average, each of us maintain about 25 active relationships in our life? Well not all relationships are neither created equal or equally helpful for us. So how do you optimize your social life as a leader?
- Conduct an audit of your relationships
- Classify your relationships along 2 measures:
- Quantitative
- Qualitative
- When you think quantitative, think how often you engage – frequent or rare and when you think qualitative, think positive or negative.Now you have 4 combinations possible
- Frequent/Positive and Frequent/Negative
- Rare/Positive and Rare/Negative
To the extent possible, keep the frequent/positive relationships, increase the rare/positive ones and decrease the frequent/negative and eliminate the rare/negative relationships.
Finally now that you know some of the techniques to sharpen your leadership edge, here is a call to action:
- Bring self-awareness in each of the areas – Energy, Physical, Mental, Value and Social areas as a leader.
- Practice the techniques shared to enhance those areas
- By doing so, consciously and deilberately, over time you are bound to enhance your leadership edge!
