3 Important Aspects of Your Leader Cards
This is a developmental tool for you— a way to integrate a practice with your unique context. Wherever you lead, whether it’s from a living room or a conference room, I want you to pick one intention everyday and create space for reflection, integration, and learning. You, dear leader, are absolutely worth pouring into and developing so that you can have greater impact in your spheres of influence.
Leader Cards make development accessible.
Leader Cards are for the busy leader, the leader with a to-do list a mile long, the leader who consistently puts everyone else first, and then realizes they’re on empty.
We are meant to lead from a place of wholeness— yes, you too busy leader.
To do that, developmental habits are key in making sure we prioritize our own growth/mindset/learning, as much as we prioritize the same for others.
So Leader Cards are something tangible, a visible artifact meant to sit on your desk and direct you back to an intention for that day—just one intention for one day with 5- or 10-minutes of reflection to process.
They are meant to guide you into reflection and practice, and help you to create space for more impact in your leadership through the way you intentionally approach meetings and conversations.
My mission from day 1 as a grad student working toward a Masters in Leadership Development was to find a way to make leader development accessible at every level—to train the leadership student with the same intentionality that we would pour into a CEO.
It starts with reframing our commitment to our most valued leadership characteristics— everyday. The things you admire in the best leaders, you can work on that too and it doesn’t require the right conference, or a degree, or a specific mentor. You can start now because you are responsible for building out the identity you have deep down inside of you, rooted in those inherent core values you’ve come to trust as your “gut feeling” when making major decisions.
Leader Cards encourage immediate feedback
Seth Godin states here, “The best way to change long-term behavior is with short-term feedback.”
Most leaders I talk to say they don’t receive enough feedback-- and while some would say its the overall culture of the organization where they work, they primarily attribute lack of feedback directly to a supervisor (where they would expect to be receiving feedback). I get it, we want to know when we are doing well, or when we could change things and get better. We want feedback loops that are succinct, productive, efficient, and rewarding. However, we won’t always get that-- even though we should all strive for the level of communication and radical candor that Kim Scott teaches us (here).
Like many leaders feeling alone and on an island at times, I had to create systems for getting the feedback I needed to thrive. Because a lot of my work was events-based, I could gather data that painted the picture of success or failure.
How many attendees were there?
Did they stay?
Did we have 50 pounds of ice cream leftover?
But what about the spaces when we need deeper feedback on our decisions as leaders?
Did I sacrifice my values there by making that call?
Have I honored my team, or hurt them, with the way I handled that?
Could I have done better with the way that conversation went?
And when we don’t give ourselves time to reflect after key leadership decisions and our subsequent behaviors, we miss the opportunity for learning. We forget, we move on, we have to put our mental and emotional energy into the next task.
But what happens when we slow down and consider creation of our own feedback loop, one where we take the time to ask ourselves the questions we crave from a supervisor? I would say that creates a comparable learning environment, so we rooted Leader Cards in reflection.
3 questions in the morning when you are mapping out your day.
How am I embracing this intention in my leadership or with my team right now?
How will I strive to make this word impact my day based on the plans, work, and conversations I have ahead of me?
As a leader, what would change if I truly embodied this word?
And 3 questions in the evening to create a meaningful feedback moment for yourself:
How did this Leader Card impact or influence the way I led myself and/or my team today?
Did it change how I approached a specific situation as a leader or could I have done something differently?
How will I continue to integrate this intention more authentically into my daily leadership in the future?
These are not the only questions you should live by as a leader, but it is a daily practice that fosters the environment of learning for your development. Cheers to the leader journey and the process of becoming a better version of ourselves everyday.
Leader Cards allow us to embody the same traits we notice in other leaders.
When I originally started the Leader Cards project, I reached out to 20 trusted leaders and asked them to give me the words they associated with a leader (read more here). Those words reflected the intentions many young leaders noticed in others and yet had the capacity to embrace in their own leadership right now.
Leadership is not a placeholder out in the future of our work-- it is the very real space we find ourselves in everyday. I was tired when leaders themselves would fail to see the current leadership paradigm they were in, solely because they felt they had not arrived there yet.
Leader Cards move you from bold statements about good leadership (i.e. “A leader is…”) to the personal affirmation of individual leadership (i.e. “I am…” or “I embrace…”) and this makes it actionable. We recognize it’s not just for the leader we put on a pedestal, but for ourselves (me, my journey, my leadership).
As daily affirmations, rather than future plans, Leader Cards train our mind to be present in the practice of our development. It becomes so much easier to work on our leader development, our journey toward wholeness, when we can see the incremental shift happen one day at a time.
It eliminates the need to be perfect.
We often put “leadership development” out there like some grand plan to change the world with our learning. It feels big and lofty and like we may need a 14-day conference with a fire-walk to really solidify the journey. And yet, the greatest leaders got to where they are by waking up and doing their work every single day with integrity to themselves and the task at hand.
I don’t expect you to be Mother Theresa tomorrow, but when you work at building up generosity and compassion day after day after day and then string it together for years, would you begin to be moving closer to leadership that reflects the characteristics of Mother Theresa? Absolutely.
Will you have a day where you are not compassionate and speak harshly with a team member? Sure.
Would it benefit you to reflect at the end of the day how you could have handled the situation better next time? Of course.
How then can you begin to work with rhythms of grace for yourself for your leadership that also model commitment to the bigger picture and the grander goal?
You actually go back to step 1 & 2:
You start doing it everyday - make it accessible.
You focus on change in the moment - immediate feedback.
It’s not the only system, but it’s a part of the developmental process and uncovering pieces of your leadership that are meaningful and create impact in your own life and in the lives of others. When we do this, we can enter into transformational leadership - we can begin to model it in our actions and inspire it in others.
Draw your next Leader Card with intention.