VISION: You want to get up every day and go to work at a place where you feel valued and respected. You want to use your gifts, talents, and strengths to make a difference in your organization and with those you serve. And it would probably be amazing to end your workday with energy left for the rest of your life.
However, if you are like most nonprofit leaders, you spend much of your time in survival mode.
You feel overwhelmed, overloaded and overworked. As the tension, stress and responsibilities increase, you worry about how others view your credibility. You often fear you are about to lose your composure. Sadly, most days, you are anything but confident that you can handle all that is on your plate.
Here's the truth. You will never get to that first vision if you don't become a more self-aware leader.
Exceptional nonprofit leaders are self-aware leaders
As a nonprofit leader, you will never lead well if you don't learn how to regulate your emotions, manage your reactions and utilize your values to make decisions. Strong leaders also know and use their strengths, know what areas they may not be as strong in, and how to compensate for those deficits. Finally, strong leaders use their personality traits rather than hide their authentic selves. These are marks of a self-aware leader.
To become a truly great leader and feel good about your work, your impact, and how you lead is to become a self-aware leader. Increasing your self-awareness takes time, intention and inner work. But, it is also the mark of a truly amazing leader.
A self-aware leader creates a healthy working culture
When I talk about a great leader, I'm not talking about a leader who gets stuff done. Instead, I'm talking about a leader who, yes, achieves tremendous outcomes but also creates a strong working team, a psychologically safe culture, and who is comfortable in their own skin. I'm talking about a leader who can stay composed on even the most stressful days, make ethical decisions decisively and navigate tough conversations with clarity, humility and courage.
A self-aware leader can rise to the challenge
This type of leader, and yes, it can be you, actually enjoys getting up and going to work every day. They are passionate about their work and know they serve a bigger mission. They recognize there will be challenges and obstacles that need to be overcome and that it's not always going to be easy, but they're up for the challenge.
Raise your hand if you are ready to be that type of leader!
Traditionally, the nonprofit sector hasn't supported leaders to become more self-aware.
Before we get to how to do that, let's identify why you may have struggled so far.
The problem is that we haven't enabled this type of leader to emerge easily in the nonprofit sector. Instead, we've provided training and support for leaders to do the job but not grow as individuals.
The leaders that have become more self-aware have done it on their own
To be fair, some nonprofit leaders are very self-aware. But, I'd be willing to wager that those who have done the work to become self-aware have done it on their own. Using their own time, at the expense of their own dollar. And sadly, many of them kept it under wraps.
See, here's the thing - to increase self-awareness, you'll need to do things like journal, meditate, read non-leadership books, and perhaps take courses that seem completely unrelated to nonprofit leadership. You may even hire a coach, find a mentor or join groups of others leaders doing this type of inner growth work too.
While you may love that kind of learning and growth, you may also worry that others may view this type of learning as hokey and a waste of time and certainly not quality leadership training. Unfortunately, you wouldn't be alone. Far too many leaders have hidden the personal development work they've done. Others have desired to do it, but struggle to find a safe place to do it, a way to make it fit into their day, and the inner courage to take it on.
We need to make the shift to support personal development work
The nonprofit sector NEEDS you to grow from the inside out. We desperately need self-aware leaders to step-up and lead our organizations through these challenging times in a new way.
Sadly, we all know that the nonprofit sector is riddled with leaders in survival mode, in cultures lacking psychological safety and that could even be described as toxic. Too many employees are warm bodies filling a position. Burnout, high turnover and mental health issues are the norms.
None of this is going to change until leaders start to grow themselves, increase their self-awareness and lead differently.
The starting point to increase your self-awareness
How does this change start? It starts with you. To begin, you'll need to recalibrate your mindset.
Try these new thoughts on:
I know that I need to grow myself to be an amazing leader from the inside out.
I'm committing to creating a plan to become more self-aware.
I'm going to take courageous steps to become more self-aware.
I will make it safe for those around me to do the same.
To increase your self-awareness, you'll need to commit to self-reflective work. Here are the three steps to take:
Get a journal, a notebook or a file on a computer.
Schedule 15 minutes each week for self-reflection time.
In your journal, explore what makes you tick (values, ethics, triggers, traits and skills) and how to harness those in your leadership.
Exercises to develop your self-awareness
If you are looking for help to do the self-reflective journaling part, here are three exercises to get you started:
Explore your values: Define your top three values and what do you mean to you. Then, consider how you use those values to make decisions at work.
Evolve your character: Examine the character traits you'd like to exude in leadership. Then, consider how you can develop those in yourself.
Expand your emotional literacy: Grow your emotional vocabulary so that you can begin to understand how emotions show up, what triggers them for you, and how to manage them.
You'll grow yourself when you commit to growing yourself. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that anyone else will help you create a personal development plan. So you must take ownership of it; including, creating your own goals, plans and strategies for how you're going to develop yourself.
These steps will help you to wake up each day feeling more confident and capable of handling all that is on your plate, and you'll be able to do it with your head held high.
Leadership Development Coach Kathy Archer helps women develop confidence, maintain their composure and lead with integrity! She is the author of Mastering Confidence and the host of the Surviving to Thriving podcast. Kathy blogs for women leading in nonprofits at www.kathyarcher.com/blog
Photo by Alysha Rosly on Unsplash
