3.14 The Law of Attraction-Enable Inspired Action through Teams
EGL Newsletter Volume 3.14
This is the third article in a five part series on the Five Competencies for Transformational Leaders. Literature on leadership is filled with information on what it takes to lead others. You will find a mixture of behaviors, competencies, beliefs, approaches and stories about leaders. At the EGL Group, we keep it simple. Yes, we talk about behaviors, we talk about competencies, and we talk about beliefs. For us, keeping it simple means that we keep it within a framework that we know to have the greatest impact. This allows you to truly focus your energy.
The Five Competencies represent areas that most relate to creating transformation within yourself and with others. Within those competencies is an underlying belief set that fundamentally drives what we manifest in life. This is called the Law of Attraction. This law states that whatever we think about, we get. We create sub-conscious pictures of our life, through our training, our experiences, and our up-bringing. By focusing on these, we tend to create them. This is actually fairly simple to do, as we are using this law every day, whether we know it or not. By definition, lawful means it happens whether or not we are aware of it, or whether or not we believe in it. So, your life is already being shaped by your thinking, whether or not you are aware of it, or whether or not you believe it.
Understanding this law allows us the power and freedom of choice to begin creating the life we want in an active and dynamic way. As you might have heard me say before, the first and fundamental act of leadership is to lead yourself. At the core, that leadership act begins the moment you take charge of leading your thinking. You can only lead others to the extent you have taking this journey for yourself. I believe that the framework of the Five Competencies for Transformational Leaders, coupled with the Law of Attraction, is a fantastic place for leaders to begin. Even so, if you want to get really simple, just take on the Law of Attraction.
The first agreement you have to make with yourself is to take responsibility for your thinking and the impact that has on your future. You may have heard the saying “Expect success and you will get success.” That is fundamentally true, with a huge extra part. You must also have a congruent set of thinking along those lines. I often find self-sabotaging thinking that follows this expectation. Very often, people will hold a pocket of thinking that is completely out of alignment with their overall beliefs, which will turn up in the surprise turn of events when things have seemed to be going very well.
So, here’s an opportunity for 2007. Get clear about your thinking. Get aligned with your overall path. Take on your worries and ruminations and shift that energy into something positive and creative. You will be very glad you did.
Enable Inspired Action through Teams (Collaboration)
Any time a task is larger than one person, some sort of team is the best structure to accomplish it. Leaders create environments where teams can take informed and creative action. Research clearly supports the effectiveness of team structures (when properly led) in accomplishing all varieties of work.
To lead a team environment, the leader must think and act with true collaboration. This involves actively building trust and creating emotional safety for communications. Besides having a clear sense of mission and purpose, teams must have clear, timely and relevant information and must work together to make decisions and act on the results. Teams can only pull together to the extent that they are clear together.
The significance of leadership as opposed to management or delegation to a team is in the degree of inspiration that you provide to the team. All groups need elbow room, but more importantly, they need to be able to connect their own passions and commitment to the larger work of the organization. As a leader, it is required that you first believe that a team will provide more depth and quality of work than you can do yourself. It means that your job is to work with the container of a team and focus on the elements that are most important for team success. This is the element of leadership that is most important with a team.
As a leader, here are some questions you need to ask yourself about how you will actually engage with teams.
Trust
How will I build trust?
Conflict
How will I resolve or heighten conflict in the team?
Commitment
How will I act out my commitment to this team?
Accountability
How will I demonstrate my accountability to this team and the members?
Attention to Results
How much attention to results will I pay?
On which results will I focus?
In summary, there are two parts required for the leader related to teams. First, have a consistent and supportive belief set about what the team can do and the absolute creative power they hold. Second, focus on the aspects of the team that are truly supportive of collaboration, not those related to control. Getting this sort of focus is the groundwork for getting amazing results from teams.
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