A leadership course is held in a conference room on the fourth floor of the municipal building (the one with the good coffee machine and a view of the canal). In attendance are 12 managers from different departments. The facilitator, Karin, has kind eyes and a habit of asking a question and then waiting much longer than feels comfortable for the answer.
Elena signed up for this course willingly. She signs up for most things willingly. If it looks good, it is good, and besides, she is genuinely curious about the Personal Compass exercise Karin had described in the invitation email. A tool for mapping your val-ues, strengths, what drains you, what energises you. A foundation for self-leadership. Elena had read that and thought: useful for the team. She has already been thinking about who on her team might benefit from it the most. Jonas, probably. Sara.
Now, Karin is asking everyone to turn to their own Personal Compass.
The room quiets. Pens are uncapped. Elena looks down at the paper in front of her.
The compass has six sections. Elena starts with the easy ones. Strengths. Moving her pen quickly, she writes: structured thinking, reliability, navigating complexity, translating strategy into action. That’s true. She knows it’s true because she’s been told it’s true many times, in many performance reviews. She moves on to Values, writing: fairness, responsibility, quality. Elena pauses before adding: Peo-ple. Looking at it, she wonders if People is perhaps too vague. But she doesn’t know how to make it any more specific so she leaves it and moves on.
She arrives at the box in the centre of the compass which is slightly larger than the others. It reads: What energises you at work?
Elena puts her pen to the paper. She writes: Solving problems. Then she stops. She looks at it for a moment. It’s true. Isn’t it? She is energised by solving problems. By that feeling when a difficult situation untangles. When the right decision becomes clear. When someone comes to her overwhelmed and leaves with a plan. That feeling is real.
But then something else surfaces. It is quieter and less comfortable: Is that what energises me, or is that just what I’m good at?
Elena tries to think of the last time she felt genuinely energised at work. Not satisfied. Not relieved. Not competent. But energised. The way the word implies something being added rather than depleted.
She thinks of Mrs. Andersson at the book club. The way her face had looked. She thinks of Jonas’s A3 diagram, spread out on the table during his first week. The hand-drawn lines connecting people. She had felt something then. Not the satisfaction of a problem solved. Something more like… possibility?
Elena doesn’t write anything else in the box. After lunch, Karin introduces the second exercise. “Imagine your ideal work week,” she says. “Not realistic. Not what your calendar looks like. But how you would design it if you could design it from scratch. What kinds of work, rhythms, conversations and spaces would there be?”
Elena starts writing. Monday: team meeting and weekly planning. Tuesday-Thursday: problem-solving, stakeholder meetings, reviewing outputs, supporting the team with blockers. Friday: wrap-up, reporting, preparation for the following week.
She reads it back. It looks exactly like her current week. After a pause, she adds: More time for strategic thinking. Karin walks slowly around the room. She stops near Elena, glances at the paper without reading it, then asks the group a question. It’s addressed to no one in particular, but that lands, somehow, specifically in Elena’s thoughts:
“I’m curious–when you read what you’ve written, does it feel like something you’re dreaming toward? Or something you’re already living?”
A few people laugh. Elena laughs too. On the train ride home, Elena looks out the window at the city moving past. The canal. The old hospital building that’s been converted into flats. A group of teenagers on bikes.
She thinks about the compass sitting in her bag. The centre box, half-empty.
She thinks about something her mother used to say when Elena was a teenager and couldn’t make a decision: “What do you actually want, Elena? Not what makes sense. What do you want?” Elena had always found the question slightly frustrating.
She pulls out the compass. Reads her list of Strengths. Reads her Values. Reads Solving problems in the centre box, alone.
She picks up her pen. Underneath, she writes one more line. Small, slightly hesitantly, as if reserving the option to deny that she wrote it:
To see people become more than they thought they could be. She looks at it for a moment. Then she puts the canvas away and opens her email inbox: she has 43 unread messages since this morning.
2.1What is self-leadership and why it is important for leading together#
Self-leadership is a concept built upon psychological theories that emerged in the mid-1980s. Originally, it focused on how individuals can improve their performance by influencing and managing themselves through self-direction and self-motivation. The idea was that individuals can improve their effectiveness by employing different strategies, like self-observation, building self-awareness, setting improvement goals and rewarding themselves once they achieve them. The main researchers who introduced the concept of self-leadership, and the way it is often understood in mainstream research, are Charles C. Manz, and Christopher P. Neck.*
In contrast to the original self-leadership research, which pinpoints productivity and effectiveness as the objectives of self-leadership, our understanding of self-leadership places more value on learning about oneself, self-acceptance and self-care, thereby better equipping individuals to support themselves in life and work, as well as to collaborate more effectively with others. When team members are aware of and regularly reflect on both how they are affected by others and how they, in turn, affect others, they can talk about it with their colleagues, and, in this way, learn from each other, develop together and support a culture of building trust, mutual learning, and care. These are all important preconditions for practising collective forms of leadership in teams and organisations.
On the other hand, self-leadership is an important enabler of the transition from traditional hierarchical organisational models to more participatory models because it can support individuals on their own transformation journeys. During the transformation process, both managers and employees need to rethink their own roles and develop new competencies – with employees taking more initiative, responsibility and stepping up in their leadership practice, and managers letting go of control and the traditional steering function, instead sharing leadership with others on the team and assuming a more facilitating and coaching role. Such changes should be accompanied by a self-development process that is part of practising self-leadership.
The need for self-leadership skills increased rapidly with the widespread introduction of remote work and distributed teams during the COVID-19 pandemic. As employees strengthened their autonomy, the need for more self-leadership and collective forms of leadership expanded. Managers could no longer maintain control over employees in the same way as before, when everyone sat at the office together. Consequently, employees had to take more individual responsibility for their ways of working. This included deciding where and when to work, what to prioritise in work, when to take breaks, and how to set healthy boundaries between work and private time, among other things.
In our research, we have focused on three core aspects that help us define self-leadership: self-awareness, self-direction and self-regula-tion. Self-awareness serves as the basis for self-leadership practice and involves fostering awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses, behavioural patterns and how those affect oneself and others in the work context – especially in challenging situations. This aspect is also connected to developing awareness of one’s own personal values, needs and purpose. In the context of moving from hierarchies towards leading together, self-awareness helps individuals reflect on what roles they often assume in their team or how they currently contribute to existing team dynamics and patterns.
The three core aspects of self-leadership
The second element of self-leadership, self-direction, is connected to one’s ability to connect personal values and purpose to team and organisational values and purpose. It’s also about being able to define and prioritise work tasks in a way that supports the work’s purpose, values, goals, and the individual’s needs. In the context of moving from hierarchies towards leading together, self-direction also helps individuals set the desired direction in which they would like to develop as individuals. A development process that involves reshaping their role on the team in order to practise a more shared form of leadership. Reshaping one’s role can, for example, look like developing new skills, such as facilitation, coaching, and feedback, or taking more responsibility and being proactive in terms of actively participating in team processes – whether for example, co-facilitating team meetings, actively contributing to shared decision-making processes, or leading development initiatives, etc.
The third aspect of self-leadership, self-regulation, enables an individual to regulate their own behaviour towards desired goals by using external work environments, tools, processes and strategies to support oneself at work. Strategies can include, for example, effective time management, designing work routines for balance, and using workspaces in a way that supports different work tasks.
When striving to move from hierarchies to leading together, self-regulation also means that individuals intentionally reflect on how they are embodying desired behaviours and developing as individuals in order to actively contribute to shared leadership practices and goals they set for themselves in this area.
2.2In what ways can self-leadership stand in the way of leading together?#
In our research, we have seen that increased hybrid and remote forms of work – which allow more work flexibility and give individuals the autonomy to decide where and when they work – sometimes generate negative effects for teams and collective forms of leadership, even though they strengthen individuals in their self-leadership. While increased autonomy often empowers workers to feel more influential and have a greater sense of ownership in their work, or to proactively initiate activities in the workplace, it sometimes runs the risk of people closing themselves off in their own bubbles at home, focusing predominantly on their work tasks while losing a sense of the bigger picture, shared purpose and belonging. In this process, possibilities for collective learning and support between colleagues who are not the closest collaborators in daily work tasks are lost. Especially when there is a strong performance-driven culture that places a lot of pressure on individual performance, increased self-leadership might get in the way of collective learning, support and shared forms of leadership. Experienced and highly self-reliant workers, in particular, can end up in situations where they don’t prioritise meeting colleagues if it doesn’t fit their own priorities. They will, therefore, miss opportunities for deepening colleague relationships, collective learning and being there to support their colleagues when they need them.
Self-leadership and leading together in balance.
Designing and holding rituals that create time and space for deepening connection, trust and relationships between colleagues — as well as for collective learning, feedback, and mutual support — needs to be combined with high levels of autonomy and self-leadership in order to support shared leadership. These rituals can take place online, but from our research, it is clear that the teams that balance flexible work and collaborating online with physical meetings and collective rituals are most effective and better at sharing leadership. This doesn’t happen automatically in a culture dominated by a performance-driven mentality that often prioritises short-term delivery goals over the long-term investment that is required to develop a strong culture of collaboration and shared leadership. Extra care is therefore needed to encourage autonomy, self-leadership and flexible work conditions while, at the same time, ensuring there is enough space for collective rituals that strengthen a culture of trust and collaboration – a culture where leading oneself and leading together can mutually reinforce each other.
Nurturing self-awareness and connection with oneself#
We live in a fast-paced and highly digitalised society with a constant overload of incoming information and blurred boundaries between the private sphere and work. Work is constantly within hand’s reach through mobile phones and portable computers that we carry with us. When a significant proportion of people’s time is spent in front of screens, they start risking losing connection with their bodies, needs, and struggle to set healthy boundaries for sustainable work. This results in higher levels of stress and burnout at work. Developing daily practices to connect with oneself and one’s body, feelings and thoughts, is an important precondition for remaining calm, focused and present at work. Furthermore, such practices enable one to slow down and practise self-awareness.
This daily practice can help you get in touch with your body and become aware of your feelings and thoughts, just like a morning coffee/ tea ritual for slowing down, a walk or yoga/meditation practice.
As you sit on the chair, notice your breathing. You might want to close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose, breathe out through your mouth. Imagine fresh air entering your head, your chest, and then your stomach. Imagine fresh air entering your entire body, refreshing all 30 trillion cells at once. Notice your feet touching the ground, your back touching the chair, your skin touching the air. Notice your clothes touching the skin on your arms, chest, stomach, back, pelvis, thighs, knees, calves and feet. Take three deep breaths and open your eyes, gently massaging your face, arms and legs.
Cultivating self-awareness not only helps ensure a basic level of self-care, but it is also vital for self-leadership, as it enables individuals to better navigate conflict and challenging situations where tensions with colleagues might arise. Instead of responding defensively in conflict situations, self-awareness enables individuals to become aware of different parts of themselves that might be triggered in challenging situations, and learn how to meet those parts with acknowledgment, understanding and care. Through this practice, protective and hurt parts within oneself can slowly melt away or unfold. One can learn more about this practice from the internal family systems model developed by Richard Schwartz.*
One particular method that can help us become more aware of our internal dynamics and the behaviours of others that might trigger us, as well as how our own behaviour might be challenging for others, is derived from The Core Quadrant, a model developed by Daniel Ofman. This method can help us reflect upon what aspects of ourselves we would like to strengthen or develop in order to better support our team in practising shared leadership.
The Core Quadrant helps us explore our core qualities or personality strengths and their dynamic relationship with our challenges, pitfalls and allergies. This method helps us increase our self-awareness, an important aspect of self-leadership. Mapping out our natural positive qualities, like being punctual and tidy, and understanding how they can become pitfalls if we go too far with them or how they are connected to things we might be allergic to in others who are different from us (for example, someone who tends to be late or untidy), increases our own self-knowledge and helps us better function in teams. Every quality, when its limit is exceeded, can become a pitfall with a negative effect on the environment and an inner obstacle for the person possessing it. For example, too much flexibility can turn into fickleness or being too decisive can be seen as pushy. On the other hand, every excessive quality or pitfall has a positive opposite, which is a challenge and a good supplement to the core quality. The challenge provides us with opportunities to grow and act in a more balanced way. For example, the positive opposite of being pushy is being patient or reserved. Someone who is naturally very driven can sometimes be perceived as too pushy and might struggle with being patient. Learning how to be more patient is therefore their challenge and, at the same time, a learning opportunity. Part of developing one’s self-leadership is, therefore, understanding how to balance a quality like drive with patience when collaborating with others.
Core quadrant by Daniel Ofman
The last and fourth element of the Core Quadrant connected to each of our core qualities is the allergy, which is the direct opposite of a core quality. For example, if one’s quality is a strong drive and their challenge is being patient, one may have an allergy to people who are passive. Similarly, a person whose core quality is being tidy might feel allergic to people who are very untidy and disorganised. Allergies can be a source of irritation and conflict. Mapping out our core qualities, and related pitfalls, challenges and allergies can help us better understand ourselves in dynamics with others. Working with the Core Quadrant is therefore recommended for both strengthening individuals’ self-leadership and improving team dynamics, as well as for supporting shared leadership in teams. When teams can openly discuss their dynamics and how their members’ core qualities may be a source of conflict, they can better navigate challenges together. If a team realises that a certain quality is dominant among most team members – for example, being performance-driven and short-term oriented – the team might decide to recruit more members who may be more prone to slowing down, taking time to reflect and question how things are done in the future. This can help the team better balance their focus on short-term deliveries and finding quick solutions to problems with more time for reflection, challenging the status quo and exploring long-term strategic goals.
Example of a Core Quadrant analysis on an individual level.
Movement score
Movement score: a Core Quadrant exercise (120 min)#
In the centre of the room, apply two pieces of adhesive tape on the floor in the shape of a cross so that you end up with four squares. In each of the squares, place a piece of paper that you have respectively labeled Core qualities, Pitfalls, Challenges, and Allergies. Invite participants to spend 10 – 15 minutes writing their Core Quadrant qualities on sticky notes and placing them in the corresponding quadrants. Once that is done, ask the group to review the collective sticky notes in each quadrant together and discuss what their Qualities, Pitfalls, Challenges and Allergies would be as a team.
Invite everyone to embody these qualities through any kind of movement or gesture, but no talking. Have participants move from one square to another in their own timing, asking them to observe how it makes them feel and how they move in each of the quadrants. Do this for around 10 minutes.
Now, invite participants to explore different qualities by only moving from one chosen part of their body. Ask them to observe what changes when they move like that. Participants can remain in each quadrant as long as they wish or need to. There is no choreography that needs to appear. Do this for around 10 minutes.
Divide participants into groups of three and ask them to discuss how the exercise felt, reflecting upon what they observed, what they enjoyed, or what annoyed them. All reflections are welcome.
Now gathering all participants together in a circle, ask them to share their reflections. After that, find a way to incorporate movement experience and reflection in further discussions about the group’s quadrants.
Apart from knowing oneself and being self-aware, self-direction is another important aspect when practising self-leadership. Self-direction is connected to the ability to guide oneself in a desirable direction that supports one’s purpose and values in life. It therefore contributes to experiencing more meaning and engagement at work which, in turn, can contribute to a positive team climate and support the team in orienting itself towards more purpose-driven work. One practice that can support us in practising self-direction is called Personal Canvas.
The Personal Canvas is a practice that invites you to reflect upon and visualise your core values and passions. It encourages you to formulate the purpose of your work and the impact you would like your work to have on others and the world around you. It also asks you to consider which ways of working in your team and with other colleagues would support you – enabling you to work according to your values and purpose, use your passions in work, and achieve your desired impact. The first step helps increase your self-awareness around your own drives and motivations at work, which can support you in your self-leadership, helping you orient your work towards what feels most meaningful. If you would like to deepen your reflection, you may employ more creative methods that support you in the process. For example, you can make a collage to visualise your values, passions, purpose and desired impact, or even write a poem about it.
Since defining your purpose may be a challenging process, you can gather some inspiration from others who have developed specific processes and tools around this work—for example, those created by Simon Sinek or Fred Kofman, or the Japanese way of finding your way to a joyful life through Ikigai, can all be interesting sources of inspiration.
A visualisation of Ikigai, the Japanese way of finding your way to a joyful life.
Since this book focuses on strengthening the way we lead together, we encourage you to also use the personal canvas to support your team. When team members share their personal values, passions, purpose and desired impact, a powerful process of understanding each other on a deeper level takes place. If the team can then develop shared values, purpose and desired impact – creating a bridge between personal values and purposes and the broader vision, purpose and values of the entire organisation – this practice becomes even more powerful. This way of working supports organisations in their movement towards becoming a more purpose-driven organisation. One that often increases motivation, engagement and a sense of meaning at work. And last but not least, what is crucial for each team is to develop ways of working that embody and integrate their shared values, purpose and desired impact in regular work routines. This, therefore, becomes not a one-time activity to be completed in a workshop, but a continuous practice in daily work.
Developing shared values, purpose and ways of working in the project team through collective collage
A third element of self-leadership that complements and works hand in hand with self-awareness and self-direction is so-called self-regulation. Self-regulation is related to an individual’s ability to regulate their behaviour in a way that supports their development and ways of working in a desired direction. Meaning that one notices when they work against their own values, goals and well-being, and have the capacity to repair their course of action. Self-leadership, therefore, means one is able to establish good work routines on an individual level, contributing to one’s well-being at work – finding balance between delivering results and having time for learning, development and recovery. Since we are not isolated as individuals at work, it is important that team members don’t focus solely on setting good work processes for themselves. They should also utilise their self-leadership skills to support one another in finding sustainable work routines and balance on the team level.
One practice that invites you to think proactively about how you want to use your time in the most meaningful ways when working, and establish more supportive work routines for yourself, is called My Dream Work Week.
My dream work week
Practice
Support questions for thinking about your dream work week#
While Personal Canvas is a tool that helps us raise self-awareness and direct ourselves towards value and purpose-driven work, My Dream Work Week is more of a practical tool. It not only helps us to plan and design our time and work processes in a way that prioritises work according to our values and purpose, but it also helps us find the right flow and balance in our work. Before designing your dream work week, we recommend you start by reflecting on how you currently spend your time during a typical work week: How do current ways of working support you (or not) in achieving your purpose and desired impact? Do you work according to your values and apply your pas-sions at work? Do you feel well and balanced at work today? Do your current ways of working support you in learning new things and contributing to the larger organisational purpose in a meaningful way? In this reflection, it can be helpful to identify the challenges you experience while working in the way you work today. For example, perhaps you spend too much time in meetings that don’t seem to create real value, immediately react to every email or message when it arrives, or feel stressed and don’t take the time to pause, recover and reflect, etc.
Next, think about how you would visualise a week in terms of how you would like to relate to time if it weren’t represented by a typical work planning calendar divided into days and hours. Maybe your week would look like a spiral, or circles of different sizes representing different chunks of time when you do different things?
An example of My Dream Work Week visualised through collage.
How would you divide your time in order to focus on what matters most in your work? Maybe you would like to reserve longer periods of time for focused work, a few days a week? Maybe working from home when you have more focused work to complete helps you to get more peace and quiet? Maybe you would like to spend certain days in person with colleagues to build relationships, strengthen collaboration, advance project deliveries, learn from others, and do more creative work? Maybe you would like to spend certain days in spaces that can bring new inspiration? Like a co-working space, library, art museum or your customer’s office. Or maybe you miss having time for breaks, when you can take a walk, chat with colleagues, or do some stretching? Be creative in how you visualise your dream work week and use it as a visual reminder that you can revisit in the future, to see what you’ve managed to integrate into your work processes and where you still have opportunities to grow. Doing this exercise with your team can be very useful as it is more powerful when team members support each other in finding the right flow for working and leading together.
Participant in our process sharing a personal reflection through a photo.
One aspect of work that participants in our research projects often overlook is dedicated time for slowing down, just being, and opening up to reflection and new ideas. Reflection instigates self-regulation. If we don’t stop and look at what’s happening from a distance, we will be less likely to notice what we need to change and how we want to do that.
Therefore, we invite you to develop your own weekly reflection practice, setting aside some time to reflect on your work week. In our projects, we have been developing a practice called Body-photo-poetry voicing that you can try out to give yourself some time to connect with yourself and reflect on what’s happening in your work, opening up space for new insights and ideas. You can do this at the end of each week or find your own timing for it.
Start the practice by sitting in a quiet space with your eyes closed. Just focus on your breathing, taking a few deeper breaths to relax any tensions in your body. You may continue with a brief body scan, slowly sensing all your body parts, gradually moving from sensing your feet touching the ground to the top of your head. Still keeping your eyes closed, think back in time and go through your work week, observing what memories, feelings and images pop up for you. You can continue this practice by taking a slow walk outside (in nature if possible), continuing to reflect on your work week, but now focusing on identifying the most meaningful moments at work. When an idea comes to you, you can stop walking and pause, looking around and finding something in your environment that you associate with this meaningful moment. For example, you might associate a deep conversation with a colleague with two flowers leaning onto each other in the grass in front of you. Take a picture of what you notice. Then, continue your walk. On your way, stop a few times more, whenever reflections on meaningful experiences at work pop up, and take a photo of something you associate with each memory. After the walk, look at the photos you took and write down a reflection about your experiences and thoughts from the walk. Or choose one photo from the walk and capture the experience of that specific meaningful work moment it represents in a short poem. Reflection walks can also be focused on other things, such as the most challenging moment at work you’ve experienced lately, or a moment when you really felt your work made an impact. We encourage you to practise reflection together with your team. When you share personal thoughts, feelings and stories, sharing photos and poems with your colleagues, you will deepen trust and connection within your team and, through shared reflection, open up new possibilities for learning and development..
Participants in our process sharing personal reflections through photos.
In this chapter, we have explored different aspects of self-leadership, from self-awareness to self-direction and self-regulation. When it comes to supporting oneself at work, we have argued that self-leadership skills are very helpful – especially in a fast-paced, digitalised society where remote working is increasingly common. However, self-leadership is also a key enabler in helping us nurture the relational values of mutual trust, learning, care and collaboration. Such values are important for teams and organisations that want to strengthen collective forms of leadership. It can contribute to psychological safety in a team, which you can learn more about in the next chapter.
Furthermore, the practice of self-leadership can strengthen the ability of individuals and teams to navigate increased complexity and uncertainty. By cultivating greater awareness of who they are and what is important to them, team members can better orient themselves in complex situations where they need to continuously prioritise between many possibilities. The ability to set healthy boundaries and prioritise what is important is crucial for avoiding high levels of stress and burnout – especially in a society dominated by information overload and increasingly blurred boundaries between one’s work and private life. Maintaining a healthy sense of self-awareness and direction while, at the same time, staying open to different perspectives and holding several views simultaneously, is an essential ability for navigating a complex world in which we are often faced with tackling complex challenges and collaborating with people who have diverse backgrounds and world views..