5 Keys to Self-Leadership and Why They Matter

By: Cal Walters

The hardest person you and I will ever lead is the person we see in the mirror each day. 

It’s hard to lead yourself.  I have a hard time leading myself.  

At the same time, how well we lead ourselves determines our capacity to  impact the world.  

Think about it.  Who do you respect the most?  It’s the people in your life that lead themselves the best.  

If you have a boss that doesn't lead himself or herself well, you likely won't respect them. You may still do what they ask you to do, you may want their title or their car, but you won't be inspired by them and you won’t aspire to be like them.  

We often see this first with our parents.  Whether you want to be like your mom or dad is ultimately a product of how well they lead themselves.  Did they teach you a way of living that they don’t live out themselves?  As one wise friend recently asked me, “Does their video match their audio?”  

Helping leaders grow and lead themselves better is what gets me excited about the work we do at Intentional Leader.  I get excited about the incredible impact you can have on those in your circle of influence when you are at your best.  

I know that when you learn to lead yourself better, you become a better father, mother, friend, co-worker, organizational leader . . . the list goes on and on.    

I also know that when you lead yourself well you will be able to sustain excellence over time.  You are less likely to burn out, have a significant moral failure that implodes your career, or get to the end of your life filled with regrets.  

On the Intentional Leader blog and podcast, our goal is to bring you inspirational and actionable material that helps you lead yourself.  And we will continue to do that.  Today, I just want to outline what I consider 5 foundational keys to leading yourself well.  We will explore these in more depth with future content.  

1. Commit to learning about yourself. 

The best leaders I know create consistent moments in their lives to get quiet, journal, ask themselves questions, explore their values, reflect on experiences, and get to know who they are and who they want to become over a lifetime.  

2. Don’t lie to yourself about yourself, even if it hurts. 

It’s hard to lead yourself when you’re lying to yourself.  As Andy Stanley points out on his leadership podcast, you have participated in every bad decision you’ve ever made.  The same is true for him and for me.  This means we have the capacity to convince ourselves to do things that are ultimately not good for us.  A key to avoiding this is to commit to being honest with ourselves even when it hurts.  Often this means taking ownership over those moments in life where we made poor decisions.  It’s not someone else’s fault.  I decided to do that.  I decided to have a bad attitude.  For more on this important topic, I encourage you to read the amazing book, Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute.   

3. Be in community and under authority. 

This may seem weird to say in an article about self-leadership, but we need community and accountability to thrive, learn, and grow.  One way that we can lead ourselves is by intentionally allowing people we respect to speak into our lives and hold us accountable to our own highest values.  This is where a lot of leaders get in trouble as they progress in their careers.  They rise through the ranks and become increasingly isolated from people that will hold them accountable.  The leaders that sustain excellence over time create their own “board of advisors” early in life and commit to being honest with them, even when it hurts.  There is no shortage of cautionary tales about leaders who fail to submit to authority.  One I recently examined was the story of Pastor Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Driscoll led Mars Hill Church through more than a decade of unprecedented growth in Seattle, but Mars Hill’s influence basically evaporated overnight largely due to a loss of trust in Driscoll’s leadership and due to his unwillingness to submit to authority.  

4. Commit to being better on the inside than you are on the outside. 

Self-leadership is all about being a person of integrity.  It's about keeping your commitments to others, but more importantly, it's about keeping your commitments to yourself.  Leaders get in trouble when they begin to value the way others perceive them over how well they are keeping their own commitments and living a life of internal alignment.  This is a similar trap as #3 for leaders who rise in the ranks.  As you become more senior, your rank or position gives you a presumption of competence and character.  People are less likely to check your work because they assume you know what you’re doing.  It becomes easier to cut corners, and if you’re not careful, you can begin to value your image over the reality of the situation.  When this happens, leaders are less likely to admit mistakes and more likely to try to cover things up to keep their images intact.  The best leaders–and the leaders that sustain excellence over long periods of time–know that integrity on the inside should always trump outward appearances.  When you live this way, you can be at peace with yourself.  

5. Choose your highest values over your immediate desires. 

We all struggle with this, and we will never be perfect, but we can strive to become people who choose our deepest values in life over our immediate, short term desires that don’t support the person we hope to become.  You say you value health and fitness because it makes you feel better about yourself, live longer, and have more energy, yet you keep choosing to cheat on your nutrition plan and you keep skipping your workouts.  You’re choosing a short term desire over your highest values.  Again, we all do this, but those that lead themselves well get better and better at choosing their deepest values over those short term desires.  A key to success in doing this is doing the work to identify your values and your why behind each value.  Then, share those values with your board of advisors and create consistent moments to be held accountable to those values.  This is not easy and it takes a lifetime to get better at this, but it’s so, so important because it determines your potential impact on others and the world.  

As you consider these 5 keys to leading yourself, think about the people you respect the most in life.  The people you want to be like.  Maybe there isn’t one person that you want to be completely like, but you probably know people that do lead themselves really well in a certain area.  For example, is there someone that is fit and healthy that you want to be like?  Is there someone in your life that exemplifies the type of parent you’d love to be?  Maybe the type of organizational leader you want to be?  I bet the reason you want to be like them in that area is because they lead themselves well in that area.  

If self-leadership were easy, we wouldn’t need to talk about this.  Yet, it’s incredibly important and we are honored to be on this journey with you.  Please reach out to us at Intentional Leader if you want help in this journey of self-leadership.  Let us know your pain points and areas you find it hard to lead yourself.  

At the end of our lives, our impact on others will be proportional to how well we lead ourselves.  Let’s go make it count today! 

If you’re interested in growing in your leadership practice and being inspired to think differently and unlock greater personal potential, we want to give you a gift. Just click the link below and tell us where to send you 12 Ideas That Will Make You A Better Leader In 2022.

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One Idea Leaders Should Take Away from the “Hippocratic Oath”

By: Wes Cochrane

As leaders, recognizing that we lead human beings, and not robots, we need a simple ethical foundation that animates our daily practice of leadership. We would all be wise to borrow from the medical profession’s embrace of the ethical principle of primum non nocere; Latin for “first, do no harm.” 

For centuries, Western physicians embraced the “Hippocratic Oath” – an ancient, 4th century BC expression of medical ethics – best remembered for the notion that physicians should “first, do no harm.” While most modern medical students no longer recite the Hippocratic Oath specifically, according to a 2011 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, most medical schools in the U.S. had oath ceremonies for their graduates. A 2015 survey of all accredited U.S. medical schools determined that 100% of all the respondents reported having oath ceremonies for their graduates during which they recited a code of ethics. The spirit of “first, do no harm” remains at the heart of these ethical expressions (see, for example, the 2019 Oath for Harvard Medical School graduates). 

When you consider the role of a physician or surgeon, doing no harm is more than avoiding a “bad thing” for their patients. It’s more profound than that. A surgeon, for example, will inflict momentary trauma to her patient’s body as she ultimately works to set the conditions for that body to heal. The scalpel inflicts pain en route to promoting healing. The cardiothoracic surgeon, performing open heart surgery, cuts into the cavity that houses the most important muscle in the body. The oncologist administers chemotherapy treatments to her cancer patients; treatments that sap their energy, weaken their bodies, and leave them feeling utterly drained–all in an effort to terminate the threat of cancerous cells. 

No doubt, physicians are well acquainted with causing pain. There is a key difference, though, between causing pain and causing harm. The physician acts to ameliorate, to improve. They act with their patients’ best interests in mind.

Leaders need to embrace this simple, but profound idea of first, do no harm. Likely, no one disagrees with the assertion that good leaders get results. However, if our understanding of effective leadership begins and ends with merely getting results, our lives, our families, and our teams will run astray. After all, poor leaders can still get results–even masterful results. 

The problem is that such leaders risk leaving collateral damage in their wake. In short, they risk harming the very people they are charged to lead. I know from experience.

I used to be an Army prosecutor. The vast majority of my cases involved allegations of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, and child abuse. These were often painful fact patterns and difficult cases. Domestic violence, in particular, was challenging because often alleged victims would recant their prior allegations, even in the face of powerful direct and circumstantial evidence. This reflects the sad, but not uncommon, dynamic of intimate partner violence–a scenario where victims often feel stuck living with their abusers. All of the prosecutors in my office took these cases seriously. 

That said, pressing forward with recommendations to court-martial (i.e., prosecute at trial) soldiers is no small thing–a prosecutor should be able to say, with a straight face, that there is not merely probable cause that a soldier committed the alleged crimes, but there is a viable pathway to conviction (i.e., that there is sufficient admissible evidence to prove the accused’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt). Recognizing the gravity (for both victim and accused), this led to disagreements within our team. Sometimes, prosecutors saw the evidence or the severity of the offense(s) differently, which led to multiple, reasonable recommendations (e.g., court-martial or something less severe).

On one occasion, as a supervising prosecutor, I found myself in a disagreement with one of my fellow prosecutors over the severity of a domestic violence case and the recommendation our team would make. My colleague felt the allegations and evidence didn’t warrant court-martial charges. I disagreed. The issue was not who was right (because ultimately, we could capture the various recommendations, identify that there was some internal disagreement, and present the options for a decision-maker to weigh in on). The issue was how I handled the disagreement in the first place. It didn’t go well…

Long story short, to my shame, it ended with me stating aloud that if my colleague couldn’t get behind prosecuting this case, I couldn’t see how my colleague could prosecute any domestic violence case… phew… To my colleague, a consummate professional, my comment was an unmitigated slap in the face.

Completely unwarranted. Completely unfair. Completely unkind. Blatantly poor leadership. 

We all left the office that Friday afternoon. I drove home in complete silence; my mind replaying, over and over, how stupid and hurtful I was. I felt convicted all evening, the next morning, and later that afternoon. Sometime that Saturday or Sunday, I reached out and directly apologized for my insensitive, foolish comment. Thankfully, my colleague had the maturity to respond to me, affirm the hurtfulness of the comment, and, nonetheless, forgive me. We successfully moved beyond that Friday afternoon, but I had still done harm as a leader. I had demonstrated a lack of self-control and elevated achieving a particular result above caring for a person. 

How do Leaders “First, do no Harm?”

Like the physician working on her patient, leaders cannot be afraid to cause pain or minor trauma to their teams as they work through friction and resolve conflict en route to accomplishing their organizational goals and imperatives. That said, leaders should first, do no harm. 

However, doing no harm as a leader is not the same as never rocking the boat, never causing pain, and never causing disagreement. Further, doing no harm doesn’t mean avoiding frustrating somebody. Imagine having to counsel a subordinate through a poor performance or hold a teammate accountable for not meeting a necessary standard. These are not easy conversations and can often be uncomfortable. Nevertheless, just because they may be painful does not mean that they are harmful.

On a healthy team, there will be freedom to disagree and freedom to have productive conflict. Leaders should invite this because the momentary pain or discomfort of conflict (even difficult, and perhaps frustrating, debate) is worth the benefit to the organization. The momentary pain promotes longer term health. For example, author Patrick Lencioni writes in his book The Advantage that:

The reason that conflict is so important is that a team cannot achieve commitment without it…The truth is, very few people in the world are incapable of supporting a decision merely because they had a different idea. Most people are generally reasonable and can rally around an idea that wasn’t their own as long as they know they’ve had a chance to weigh in. But when there has been no conflict, when different opinions have not been aired and debated, it becomes virtually impossible for team members to commit to a decision, at least not actively.

Unlike what Lencioni depicts, my example of poor leadership, detailed above, went beyond appropriate conflict and became harmful. My words and conduct were a violation of the principle of first, do no harm, and a clear example of forgetting that the person on the receiving end of my words was a human being, not a robot. 

It’s worth quoting the former Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, Dr. Louis Lasagna, who, among other accomplishments, was famous for penning a 1964 update to the original Hippocratic Oath. In Dr. Lasagna’s more modern version of the Oath, he writes, “I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.”

I can’t think of better words to adopt if I were to begin penning a leader’s “Hippocratic Oath.” As leaders at any level, we have the solemn responsibility to remember that we’re not leading or managing robots (i.e., the “fever chart” or “a cancerous growth”). In the Army, a rifle platoon leader (PL) is not merely leading a “squad leader” or a “machine gunner” or a “radio operator.” That PL is leading human beings. In other industries, leaders aren’t responsible merely for warehouse workers or sorters or drivers or tellers or electricians or secretaries or nurses or teachers or salespeople or junior associates or clerks or managers or attendants or directors. The people we lead and interact with on a daily basis are infinitely more than their productivity, their titles, or the functions they play in the organization. They are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, friends, neighbors, volunteers, etc. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, those we lead know if we view them as a person or just another object–another company asset. Accordingly, if we want healthy long term outlooks for our organizations, reminding ourselves of the burden of leading ethically, on a daily basis, is vital. 

So, if you take anything away from the medical community’s ethical expressions founded on that ancient Hippocratic Oath – remember, primum non nocere – first, do no harm. Remember that the employees in our charge and the colleagues in our orbits are more than their functions–they’re not robots. The way we treat them will echo in their families, their communities, and their lives. 

If you’re interested in growing in your leadership practice, we want to give you a gift. Just click the link below to download a free 12-page PDF full of powerful, actionable ideas and concepts from some of our previous guests on the Intentional Leader Podcast. These pages are bullet points, not lengthy text—perfect for a quick hit of inspiration in your leadership journey.

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Wes is passionate about leadership development and is a gifted speaker, coach, and teacher.  Wes recently spent the last two years as a military prosecutor at the 82nd Airborne Division, where he was consistently praised for his advocacy skills by seasoned trial practitioners. 

Wes is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the University of Richmond School of Law, and the US Army’s Ranger, Airborne, and Air Assault schools.  Prior to attending law school, Wes served as an infantry officer in the US Army where he led a rifle platoon, served as the second in command of an infantry company, and deployed to Afghanistan.  He is now a major in the Army and is attending the Graduate Course at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Charlottesville, VA. 

Wes and his wife, Anne, have three children.

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