Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Module 2 : STRATEGIC SELF- LEADERSHIP
Table of Contents
Module 2 : STRATEGIC SELF- LEADERSHIP ........................................................................................1
Lesson 1: Identifying as a Leader .....................................................................................................8
Identifying as a Leader ..........................................................................................................................................8
Lesson 1-2 - Identifying as a Leader - Skill Development Identifying as a Leader - Skill Development
.................................................................................................................................................... 13
Lesson 2 - Developing Self-awareness Developing Self-awareness ................................................. 20
Lesson 2-2 Developing Self-awareness - Skill Development Developing Self-awareness - Skill
Development ............................................................................................................................... 29
Lesson 3 - 1 Making Effective Decisions Lesson 3 - 1 Making Effective Decisions ............................. 38
Lesson 4-1 Making Ethical Decisions Making Ethical Decisions ....................................................... 60
Lesson 4-2 Making Ethical Decisions - Skill Development Making Ethical Decisions - Skill
Development ............................................................................................................................... 72
Lesson 5-1 Maintaining Psychological Well-Being Maintaining Psychological Well-Being | Coursera
.................................................................................................................................................... 83
Lesson 5-2 Maintaining Psychological Well-Being - Skill Development Maintaining Psychological
Well-Being - Skill Development ..................................................................................................... 94
Module 2 Wrap-Up..................................................................................................................... 100
1
Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Module 2: Introduction
Module 2 Introduction | Coursera
Kari Keating: You both know that being an effective leader starts with the self. We talk about
this all the time. That effective leadership starts with really knowing yourself and the way you
tick. I'm curious how each of you thinks about that in your own leadership and your selfawareness and thoughts of self as it relates to the practice of leadership. Just curious, have a
chat about it.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Elizabeth Luckman: I'll tell you this. When I went through my coaching training, we started with
the coach as self. There's all of this work about in any bi-directional relationship, you have to
pay attention to both pieces, and so when I think about myself as a coach, I recognize that I am
going to influence the other persons whether they're open, whether they're closed, whether they
feel comfortable bringing emotion, whether they are happy, whether they're sad. There's
emotion contagion there. I think about that as a leader as well, when I show up, I am bringing
something to the relationship, to the team, to the room, and so I have to know what I'm bringing
in order to make sure I'm not influencing things in a way I don't want them to be influenced. It
sounds kind of self-serving I suppose, but even something like am I smiling? Am I bringing my
good stuff? Am I inadvertently shutting somebody down because I don't agree with them? It's
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
hard to pay attention to that, but that's how I think about it.
Denise Loyd: For me what I think about related to myself and understanding myself, is how it
helps me recognize that I am not always the same as other people. When we aren't reflecting
on that, we may be going through life with a lens like, well, everyone's just like me. We all think
these things, we all feel this way, but just taken for granted. Starting with that self-awareness,
that self-reflection, helps highlight, oh people may be unlikely are different than I am in these
ways, the same people that I'm having this bidirectional relationship with may bring a very
different lens to that, and I need to take into consideration who I am and what I'm bringing and
also that the person that I'm interacting with trying to influence, motivate, help, get help from,
may bring a very different lens. That's what's really a powerful piece to me.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Kari Keating: Listening to that, I'm thinking about, before we get into the chemistry, when I
heard you talking about my influence on other people, I was almost thinking of a Chemistry
experiment with what your upbringing and how that impacts the other people molecules in the
situation. But, I'm also thinking about we can't go too far and thinking about those reactions until
we know what little molecule we are. I'm probably doing a terrible job, Chemistry is not my area.
Things like our values and our personality tendencies and our experiences and our cultural
beliefs.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Denise Loyd: How we make decisions? What influence us go into how we see a situation, the
lens that we're bringing? There are a lot of things about just how our brains work as humans full
of molecules that play out in some consistent patterns. That if we're not aware of them, we lose
the benefit from understanding what's some of the influences that are on us and in that
particular moment and also work to counteract those things.
Elizabeth Luckman: With the movement right now toward really paying attention to and being
intentional about mental health and psychological health and psychological well-being, mean a
lot of that comes down to really checking in with yourself and seeing who you are, what stresses
you out, what brings you joy, what helps you be the best version of yourself. What do you do
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
when you get off track? It's almost like a little, I'm going to call this the therapy module, or at the
very least the coaching model, really going introspective. I liked the molecular thing to take a
look at the molecule inside, that should be the name of the course, take a look at the molecule
inside.
Kari Keating: Well, I think these are great considerations as we move forward thinking deeply
about the self and who we are, and how we show up in situations, and how recognizing that all
of the decisions that we make in any given day over the course of days, use of the word
patterns, noticing our patterns, and that if we don't reflect and keep ourselves well, how those
patterns can go bad for us in our decision-making. I think this is an important next step in our
learning journey.
Elizabeth Luckman: Start with the self.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Lesson 1: Identifying as a Leader
Identifying as a Leader
Kari Keating: Tell me a little about yourself. We're all familiar with that simple question in
networking or interviews. But when you think about describing who you are, do you see yourself
as a leader? I mean think about the multiple identities you carry with you in any given situation.
For me, parent, partner, White, 50 something American, professor, friend, learner. And you? Is
leader, an identity that is salient for you? In this video, we'll be talking about identifying as a
leader. It's important to address this really personal and fundamental question as the starting
point on the journey of leadership development. Let's define leader identity. Leader identity is
the extent to which someone perceives themselves to be a leader. Put differently, leader identity
is a sub-component of one's overall identity that relates to being a leader or how one thinks of
oneself as a leader. Identity development overall is the complex process by which people
develop a sense and understanding of themselves within the context of cultural demands and
social norms. Although each of us did experience that process profoundly in adolescence,
identity development is an ongoing process that continues throughout adulthood. Cultural
factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation also affect identity
development on the way to and through adulthood. As we age, factors such as education, our
work experience and organizational roles also impact identity. Leader identity specifically is both
cognitively and socially constructed. In other words, we don't build an idea of ourselves as a
leader only in a personal vacuum. We build leader identity with information from our social
world. How people act and react around us, how our relationships unfold, then how effectively
we work on tasks with other people. These factors shape the extent to which we perceive
ourselves as a leader. In this sense, leader is more than just a role we play. It's arguably
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
deeper. It's an identity we espouse. Researchers measure leader identity with a four items selfreport survey.
Consider the extent to which you agree or disagree with the following statements. I am a leader.
I see myself as a leader. If I had to describe myself to others, I would include the word leader. I
prefer being seen by others as a leader.
Oscar Ybarra: I think self-leadership is a critical part of leadership. For me, I spend a good
amount of time talking about that in the course and then we transition to leading others. Put very
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
frankly, it's hard to inspire leadership in other people if you can't lead your life very well. But
what does that look like? And for me, there are some available models, and they've been
around for a good amount of time, on self-leadership and self-management. But they're very
cybernetic in nature. Then it's like thinking of people as thermostats. I have this goal. I'm
currently right here. I'm not getting there. How can I close the gap? I think there's so much more
that goes into self-leadership. In particular, things such as strategy-making, having an
opportunity mindset, and also being able to cultivate and nurture a supportive set of social
relationships. Just to name a few of the things that we get into this class. For me, the selfleadership pieces central to then being able to lead others.
Kari Keating: My own leadership identity came into focus for me in my mid 20s. I had been
working as a project manager for a dynamic non-profit organization in a fast-growing part of
Florida. The head of our Economic Development Council left to take another job and I was up
for consideration for his position. It was a big high profile job and I'd be collaborating with
business and government leaders across the region and the state. Our CEO took the decision
to the board for their input. I was not allowed in the room, of course, but after the long meeting
in the conference room, my boss finally emerged and called me into his office. I'm going to offer
you the job, but you need to know what some of the board members are saying. This is really
risky. She's young. She's not from here. She hasn't worked here long enough. She's too nice.
My personal favorite: she'll be in rooms negotiating with six-foot tall men. All of these elements
of my identity were reflected back to me in this instant. This is how others see me. I see those
aspects of my identity, my age, my tenure at the organization, my geographic background, my
gender, my physicality. But can people see my identity as a leader? I was ultimately offered the
job, and I went about leading and building relationships of trust across the community. I was
welcomed and included by my counterparts and appreciated by the folks I served. As the next
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
couple of years unfolded, I began to embrace my identity as a leader and that part of me
became more salient.
Why do we talk about identity so much? Why does it matter? Well, it turns out that our beliefs
about who we are and about our ability to lead are the first key ingredients to the practice of
leading and developing as a leader. My colleagues and I studied developmental readiness to
lead. We did a before and after study with young adults taking an introductory leadership class.
Like a chemistry or a math class, we assumed that they were coming in the door with different
experiences, varying degrees of capacity for the subject.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
We found that leadership develops roughly in a ready, willing, and able reciprocal process and
the threshold, the starting point, is leadership identity and self-efficacy. Our study showed that
students entering a leadership course with low confidence, missing a perception of themselves
as a leader, seem to gain little skill through the course, yet they left with much more
competence and a stronger self-identity as someone with leadership potential. We suspect that
this is due to myth busting. When people learn that leadership is not a special inborn quality, but
a set of skills that can be learned, they become more confident in their potential to lead. As an
individual develops their leader identity, they are more motivated to step into leadership roles
and practice their leadership skills, which in turn reinforces their leader identity.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Lesson 1-2 - Identifying as a Leader - Skill Development
Identifying as a Leader - Skill Development
Kari Keating: How can we get this leader identity reciprocal process going? Seeing yourself as
a leader starts with broadening our definition of what it means to be a leader. That leaders are
not just people with authority, leaders engage in a socially-constructed process of taking
responsibility for empowering others to collectively solve problems toward a shared purpose.
When we embrace this contemporary definition of leadership, we see that leader is a role open
to all of us. It's not a position we power up to, but a role we play and a set of skills we practice
over the lifespan. You can develop leader identity by growing in each of these areas, by taking
on responsibility, empowering others, engaging in problem-solving, and by communicating a
shared purpose.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Brooke Elliott: It's really helped me, I think, to be a better leader. To embrace it as a woman, is
actually quite important. I think early on in my leadership career, I try to mimic male leadership
and male characteristics. I have a lot of traditional male characteristics, I'm type A, I'm confident,
I'm a control freak, I'm outspoken. That works relatively well, but what I recognize actually
throughout my leadership career is if all I do is mimic male characteristics and I don't show that
some of the strongest characteristics that I have as a woman can be really strong leadership
characteristics, then other women don't believe that they can be leaders, right? Bbecause they
may not see the traditional male characteristics in themselves, but they can identify with many
of the traits that I have as a woman, which make me an outstanding leader. I really try to
embrace that, and I think that's probably come through for me in the last probably three to four
years.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Kari Keating: Individual's leadership self-identity and their orientation toward leadership are
believed to be related to a number of outcome variables, including the quality of leader-follower
relationship, increased leadership skill set, and deeper interest in leadership development. One
study has found that adopting a leader identity is associated with distinct leadership
competencies, including challenging the status quo, valuing diversity, and creating commitment.
Jeffrey Loewenstein: I think being a leader can be taken for granted, but I think typically, being
a leader puts a lot of weight on shoulders. Makes people feel burdens, and stress, and
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
responsibility, and accountability. The idea that I can help you shine, that I can have a
conversation and see what it is that we think might be best, that I don't have to have all the
ideas and answers, but rather I can create a context in which we arrive at them, and then
collectively work toward them because we're all bought in on them, is, I think, provides people
with a feeling that they can do it. That it's less burdensome, romanticized, heroic, and more
supportive and inspiring.
Kari Keating: Research shows that understanding one's leader identity is important for both
novice or emerging leaders, as it is for seasoned executives. Leader identity like other parts of
our self-concept, can change and develop over time and with experience. Changes in identity
can be initiated by external events, such as significant role transitions at work or participation in
professional development activities, like completing this course. We build our leadership selfconcept as we learn by doing.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Brooke Elliott: What I think about leadership though, you can read. I've read all the books, I've
read lots of them. Every time I've taken a new leadership position, one of my mentors has
suggested that maybe I read a different book, but you just have to do it. What I've learned from
an experience perspective is just unmatched. It is why every time I take on a new opportunity,
I'm super excited about my new role because I love learning and I know I'm going to learn a
tremendous amount. I don't know what book to read to better prepare myself to be the
Executive Associate Dean on Academic Programs, but I will tell you within the last week I've
already learned some new things, because I've tried different approaches. I've tried to approach
some things already like I did in my prior role like, well, that's not going to work. Then I'll adapt.
It's a learning by doing thing.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Kari Keating: Leadership development is part of our human development. It's not a separate
magic. Developing our capacity to lead is part of our lives as human beings. Our physical,
cognitive, emotional, spiritual selves that change over time. We each take a different
developmental trajectory, that's why there's no such thing as one secret formula or a one-sizefits-all recipe for achieving leadership. Instead, the focus is on you. You are encouraged to tune
in to your particular developmental trajectory, search your own life stories, and apply what you
learn about human behavior to your capacity to effectively influence others. The leadership
development journey is rooted in your belief about who you are. The way you think about
leadership influences the way you show up as a leader.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Lesson 2 - Developing Self-awareness
Developing Self-awareness
Kari Keating: As you come to believe in yourself as a leader, you build leadership skills. What
do you think is the most fundamental skill for sustaining effective leadership? Some might say
delegating, being efficient, motivating others or communicating a vision. All of those skills are
important, but there is one so powerful but so basic that it's often overlooked, that skill is selfawareness. We might even elevate self-awareness to the level of superpower and in this video
we'll see why.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Lois Boxill: I think it starts itself, I think it starts with introspection, I think you have to know your
own noise so you can differentiate it from the other noise. There's a lot of noise and I suspect as
time goes on there's just going to be more noise, so there's noise and corporations, there's
noise all around us. And I think the other role of the leaders to differentiate this is I'm stealing
this from South Dakota now. The difference between noise and signal, right? You got to know,
and the only way you can figure out signal is to understand what your internal tuning is. If you
can't recognize when you've aligned on a signal, you're hopeless.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Kari Keating: Emotions, researcher and bestselling author Brené Brown says our connection to
others can only be as deep as our connection to ourselves. Connecting in leader-follower
relationships of trust requires people to have accurate self-awareness, even though most
people believe they're self-aware, self-awareness is truly a rare quality. Researchers estimate
that only 10-15% of people actually fit the criteria. What does it mean to be self-aware? Like
many terms related to human behavior and leadership development in particular, selfawareness has different definitions according to different scholars. The ability to see ourselves
clearly, to understand who we are, how others see us and how we fit into the world or perhaps
the shortest definition, knowing ourselves inside and out.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Jeff Brown: I think it was July of 2020, it was in the middle of the pandemic. So we had a virtual
town hall and I kicked that town hall off my first 10 minutes. By kind of sharing my own journey
down this path and making it clear that I had my own due to where I grew up and things like
that. I brought my own biases to the table and I think being willing to be vulnerable in front of the
whole organization, I hoped made it okay for others to do the same. And one of the things I
encourage people to do is ask questions, it's okay to not know the answer. And as long as it's
coming from an authentic place, I think folks understand that and actually appreciate it.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Ron Myers: One of the things you can find as you rank up is that you need truth tellers, you
need people to tell you because you can very easily become blind to reality. Because if you
surround yourself with people who will only give you the things you want to hear, you begin to
feed into it and you start to believe your own madness. So part of what is important is you have
to have a space where people can be honest, where people can tell you the truth because you
need that. And again that goes back to self-awareness, and that goes back to being authentic
and being ready to admit, I don't know everything.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Kari Keating: Let's look at a helpful framework. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich has
advanced a framework that calls for two types of self-awareness. The first is internal selfawareness. And it represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations,
reactions fit with our environment and our impact on others. The second category of selfawareness is external self-awareness. Which means understanding how other people view us in
terms of those same elements that requires us to find out how others see us. As I like to say
leadership development is not a solo act, it's a social act. To develop as leaders we must focus
on both our internal and external self-awareness. It's easy to assume that being high on one
type of self-awareness would mean being high on the other. But your ex research has found
virtually no relationship between them. As a result, she identifies four different self-awareness
archetypes. Let's take a deeper look.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
According to Dr. Eurich's typology, a person low in both internal and external self-awareness
might be described as a seeker. They might not know who they are and what they stand for, or
how their teams see them. Sometimes they feel stuck or frustrated with their performance or
their relationships. They have plenty of room for development in both areas of self-awareness.
Someone with high internal self-awareness but lower external self-awareness is described as
an introspective. They know themselves well on the inside, they probably spend a lot of time
there but rarely challenged those views against how others might see them. Or rarely ask for
critical feedback that might lead to growth and unlock more leadership potential. A person low
and internal self-awareness and high and external self-awareness might be called a pleaser.
Have I touched a nerve? I'm a recovering pleaser myself. This type of person according to
Eurich is concerned with how they appear and what their impact is on others but not as
concerned or tuned into their internal world, their values and aspirations. Over time this person
might make choices that aren't in the best interest of their own fulfillment. Finally, the person
high in both internal and external self-awareness, Eurich calls simply aware.
Actually sometimes she calls these folks unicorns, they're pretty rare, they know who they are,
what they stand for and they seek out critical feedback from others. They're willing to take in
disconfirming evidence and adjust themselves accordingly. This is where leaders can really
leverage the power of self-awareness. We'll talk about developing self-awareness in a moment.
But first why should we invest so much time in this stuff?
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
It really starts and ends with this really keen and deep understanding of yourself and selfawareness is a cornerstone of emotional intelligence, right? We hear about emotional
intelligence, which is the ability to recognize our emotions, recognize the emotions of other
people, regulate our own emotions, which is sometimes difficult. And then sort of use what we
know about emotions to shape situations and manage relationships. All of that starts with the
self. So, I think it's why we see so many self-assessment tools in leadership development. And
when you take a leadership workshop or a leadership course or program, you're bound to run
into things like personality assessments, communication style assessments, conflict
management style assessment, strengths and talent assessments. And though we could maybe
critique some of those instruments, I think every one of them has a value. Because they force
us to go inside and have that little conversation with ourselves about what are our true default
styles and behaviors. And then they give us information about the way we can expect ourselves
to act in a certain situation. So, for example if my conflict style assessment tells me that I'm
normally an accommodator. That I normally just let other people do what they want to maybe
not make waves and let other people do what they think is best in a situation. The next time I'm
up against a conflict situation, I can think to myself, I feel myself accommodating again, I'd like
to practice something different. And so I might want to move toward more of a collaborative
style or depending on the value to me, a little bit more competitive style to speak up for myself
and try that. But I wouldn't know that if I hadn't done a lot of self-study. In fact, if someone
doesn't invest the time in the self-study, they're more likely to react in an emotionally volatile
way, or an uninformed way, or a way that they regret later. So I feel like self-awareness and
knowing how we show up in the world with other people in decision making situations that it
helps us regulate and be the person that we imagine our best selves to be.
The research on this is clear. Self-awareness is vitally important for leadership.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
According to Harvard Business Review, having high levels of self-awareness is associated with
all kinds of positive outcomes. When we see ourselves clearly we are often more confident and
more creative. We make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships and communicate more
effectively. We're less likely to lie, cheat and steal, we're better workers who get more
promotions and we're more effective leaders with more satisfied employees and more profitable
companies. So yeah, that's why it seems like self-awareness is a superpower. A lot is writing on
our courage to take a hard look at ourselves.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Lesson 2-2 Developing Self-awareness - Skill Development
Developing Self-awareness - Skill Development
Kari Keating: Let's think back to that finding that only about 15 percent of people fit the criteria
for self-awareness, that feels disappointingly low. It's probably because most of us have
personal blind spots, traits or aspects of ourselves outside of our consciousness that may limit
the way we act, react, and behave, and in turn, limit our effectiveness.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Lucy Chang Evans: Along the lines of blind spots, for me, I have immediate reaction, defensive
reaction when I'm criticized, and that's one of my blind spots. I have learned over the years. I've
gotten better over the years at taking criticism for what it is, understanding who is criticizing me
and still taking everything too hard. It's very easy to be so defensive that you'll push back, and
that's not what a leader does. A leader needs to take criticism, take feedback, admit that they
made mistakes if there are mistakes, and also learn the art of an apology.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Eric Scott: If I could point out one thing, one of my blind spots, that's the one is being able to
take criticism, particularly in my field marketing is the stigma of being defensive about your
work. But that's one thing I've really focused on here, particularly as I've started the program.
But I think it's about not having a knee jerk reaction to what you're hearing and listening. I've
always said that leaders listen first, but you can't do that well unless you're not practicing it.
It's never been a problem with listening to my team, but it's more cross-functionally in getting
better in that. Even if I don't necessarily agree with the feedback or even if it's not along lines of
best practices, it's still important to take it all into consideration.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Kari Keating: What can we do to develop self-awareness then? Two things, gain insight and
invite feedback.
Aravinda Garimella: For leaders. Let's talk about leaders first. The ability to listen, and the
clarity that you will never just get it right. It's a process, and what's right today will not be right
tomorrow. Being okay with that, going back to vulnerability, being okay with not getting it right,
seeking your team's feedback. It's scary to seek feedback. In fact, there's also a little bit of miss
portrayal maybe in popular culture we see leaders as people who just know what they're doing
and they don't need anyone's feedback, and those are portrayed as strong leaders. That's not
what a strong leader is. That's a leader who is only open to one point of view, which is his or
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
hers. A strong leader is someone who can sit in a room and ask, what could we have done
better? Listen, not defensively, but openly, and then go back and reflect. Not everything
everyone's going to say is something you need to incorporate, but you need to think deeply
about every suggestion and say, is that something that I could have done better than. If
someone can really break that barrier a little bit and show some courage, this is actually very
exciting. Because that means there is no limit to how good a leader you can be. Every day you
can be a better leader if you can do this iterative process feedback, improve feedback,
incorporate, improve. You can go through the cycle endlessly.
Kari Keating: Let's draw again upon Dr. Eurich's work. To brighten the light on our internal
world, she suggests examining seven areas. You can carve out quiet time each week to explore
these areas for yourself. Your values, core principles that guide your decision-making. Can you
narrow down your deepest values to the most important three or four? Passions. What projects
or activities do you never seem to get sick of or lose track of time while you're doing them.
Aspirations. What experiences or achievements do you seek? What legacy do you want to
leave behind in your work and personal life? Fit. What environment do you require to feel happy
and engaged? If you had to describe your ideal work environment, what would it be? Patterns.
Can you describe your personality in five words. What have you learned from personal
assessments that you've taken, such as personality profiles or other assessments about your
talents and styles. Reactions. How in touch are you with your top strengths and weaknesses? In
the past what have you picked up easily without a lot of training? When have you been most
disappointed with your performance. Impact. How would you describe the effect you have on
other people, both one on one and in group settings. What do you want it to be? These thought
exercises practiced often and honestly, can help a leader develop a stronger sense of internal
self-awareness. And finally, to strengthen external self-awareness. The key strategy here is
inviting feedback. The most successful leaders seek frequent critical feedback from others, from
bosses, peers, and employees.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Dr. Yurik and her team found that people who improved their external self-awareness did so by
seeking out feedback, not by pulling everyone around them, but by inviting feedback from what
she calls loving critics. People who have your best interests in mind and are willing to tell you
the truth. Who are your loving critics?
Denise Loyd: We're never going to get it all the time, we're always going to get it wrong some
time. That is creating that space for people to tell you when you've got it wrong. That's just so
critical from my perspective, and you absolutely cannot assume that you have to articulate it,
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that you want the feedback, you have to create space for that feedback to happen, you have to
respond in a non-defensive way. In fact, I would go further to say celebrate it. Assuming the
person is doing it the right tone, the right energy because let's face it, there can be obnoxious
responses and I don't think we want to celebrate that because that doesn't really help create
that safe space, but to celebrate the courageousness of someone's speaking up and saying
something that they think that you're going to find uncomfortable or disagreeable or what have
you, helps to promote that as something we truly value. It has to be reinforced and I think it's
much better to know that you're going to make mistakes and invite individuals to share with you
when you've done something that represents the wrong way, it's confusing. It's
counterproductive along with, things that are like, yeah, that was awesome.
Kari Keating: I had a boss as a loving critic. Early in my career as a non-profit executive, I was
very driven to reach organizational goals and to be a great leader and a great role model for my
staff. I was achievement focused. I loved community development work. It felt like a fit for me
and I believed I was consistently open and kind. Well, one morning I sat down with our CEO for
a performance evaluation. Look, he said "I'm really pleased with how you've taken on this role.
You've met your goals this year and you've strengthened our position in the region. But I need
to tell you how some of your staff experience your energy. Sometimes you come off as
impatient with others. It says if you're moving quickly and getting frustrated with people when
they aren't on the same page or moving at the same pace, especially as it relates to projects
that involve new technologies or new processes." He said, "To grow as a leader, you're going to
need to slow down and meet your people where they are. Listen. Be patient and learn from
them." He said, "You might not always express your impatience verbally, but I often see it in
your body language." I was shocked, I didn't know. It was a major blind spot for me. Obviously,
it was impactful. Here I am 25 years later telling the story. My internal view didn't align with
external realities. Since that time, I continue to be mindful of my verbal and nonverbal
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communication. Since then I find myself gut checking with others, asking for feedback from
loving critics, like trusted colleagues, friends, even my young adult children, they tell me the
truth.
Jay Compton: It's so important just meet people where they are, and everyone's experiences
are different. If you treat everybody the same a blanket, it's all going to fall apart. Having that
emotional intelligence can the ability to say, "What are you doing today? What are you doing?"
Some people that you think have together and you find out are mess in the inside, and helping
them to find a little bit more makes them indebted for life and I think that's important to
remember too.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Kari Keating: The development of self-awareness is ongoing through the lifespan. You might
be thinking that self-awareness sounds like the thing that just develops naturally, like with
experience. However, studies show that both experience and power can actually hinder selfawareness. One study of more than 3,000 leaders found that relative to lower-level leaders,
higher-level leaders more significantly overvalue their skills compared with other's perceptions.
The moral to that story is, don't simply rely on experience and titles to help with self-awareness.
Leaders don't become leaders by doing something they learn to do. Leaders become leaders
deliberately developing into better versions of themselves. This means not only increasing our
self-awareness, but our overall emotional intelligence. Being an effective leader starts from
within. We cannot expect to successfully lead others until we have been thoughtful about who
we are and how we influence.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Lesson 3 - 1 Making Effective Decisions
Lesson 3 - 1 Making Effective Decisions
Denise Loyd: Did you know that adults make on average about 35,000 decisions every day?
The more responsibility we have, the more likely we are making even more decisions. As
leaders, these decisions impact countless other people and processes. So it's important to
understand how we make decisions to support our ability to develop skills that can help us
improve our decision-making. Decision-making, broadly defined, is the process of identifying
and selecting alternatives. Think about all of the different decisions you make in a day from what
to eat for breakfast to how to deliver performance feedback, to innovating new products. You
make small decisions that maybe only affect you, and you make bigger decisions that impact
those around you. When we make decisions, we engage in two primary processes, judgment or
evaluation and choice or selection.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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The desire to understand how humans make decisions to help improve the process can be
traced back to the 17th century with philosophers and mathematicians like Descartes. In fact,
you may be familiar with the popular decision-making technique called the Descartes Square.
In this model, you answer four questions to help facilitate your judgment and your choice.
Question 1, what will happen if this happens? Question 2, what will happen if this doesn't
happen? Question 3, what won't happen if this happens? Question 4, what won't happen if this
doesn't happen? These questions help you clarify potential outcomes, giving you a way to
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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evaluate your options. In the mid 20th century, decision-making research expanded. It was
during this time that John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern identified the ideas behind
game theory in which people's decisions are influenced by not knowing how other people are
going to act.
Much of the work during this time was influenced by economists and relied on assumptions of
rational thinking. When we use the word rational here, we mean linear and logical thinking.
Rational choice theory is based on the premise that individuals make choices in search of
maximizing their own utility.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Expected value theory, which was prevalent early decision-making research, was rooted in
utilitarian philosophy and suggested that humans make rational, logical decisions designed to
maximize their own expected utility or value. A significant change in how we think about
decision-making came later from the work of Herbert Simon, who was an economist, political
scientist, and cognitive psychologist.
He introduced us to the concept of bounded rationality, which refers to the fact that humans are
actually limited in their rational or logical thinking because of cognitive limitations and
distortions. He highlighted the idea that humans are not logical, rather there are lots of cognitive
distortions that inform our decision-making. In particular, he identified that humans do not
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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necessarily maximize their expected value, rather they satisfy, seeking acceptable or adequate
outcomes as opposed to perfect ones. Building on the work of Simon, another significant
milestone in understanding how humans make decisions comes from two very well-known
economists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who are credited with developing the
concept of prospect theory.
This broadly suggests that humans value losses more than gains. Through their rather famous
academic partnership, Kahneman and Tversky identified that people's risk preferences change
with respect to gains and losses as well as with how certain those outcomes are. Here's a
commonly used example that demonstrates this phenomenon. Think about this situation. Which
of these options would you prefer? Either a 100 percent chance to win $10 or a 50 percent
chance you win $20 with a 50 percent chance you will win nothing. Take a minute and pick one
or two. When you ask this question to a large group of people, most people will select option 1,
the sure thing. Okay, let's try again. Which one of these two options would you prefer? One, a
100 percent chance to lose $10, or two, a 50 percent chance you'll lose $20 with a 50 percent
chance you'll lose nothing. Which one would you select this time? Again, when we run this
question by a large group of people, the majority select option 2. Why is this? According to
prospect theory, we value losses more than gains and we are more risk averse under conditions
of uncertainty. So in the first option, you're more likely to take the $10 because it's a sure thing.
But in the second option, you're more willing to gamble because the sure thing is a loss, not a
gain.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Part of what this demonstrates is the power of framing. When we frame decisions a certain way,
we can influence different outcomes. Framing is just one type of cognitive bias that research
shows humans fall victim to, adding credence to the idea of bounded rationality. Daniel
Kahneman wrote a book published in 2011 called, Thinking, Fast and Slow. This book compiled
much of the research he and Tversky had uncovered over their years of working together. A key
finding from Thinking, Fast and Slow is the idea that there are two systems we use to make
decisions. System 1 is faster and more reactive. It's based on our experience and we use
heuristics or shortcuts to help us make decisions.
Consider the decision to tie your shoes, drive to work, or even check your email. We're often in
system 1. System 2 is slower and more deliberate. We take time to pull in as much information
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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as we can and we use decision-making tools to evaluate our options and are more thoughtful in
our selections. This is where analytical decision-making and thoughtful analysis come into play.
Humans are always subject to biases, whether we are in System 1 or System 2. However, we
are more likely to fall victim to these biases in System 1, where we are using more heuristics. In
System 2, we can make ourselves more aware of these biases and use tools to attempt to
overcome them.
Why does all this matter for leaders? Leaders are responsible for people and processes in their
organizations and teams. This means that leaders likely have to make more decisions, both in
terms of pure numbers and also because their decisions have more downstream effects or
consequences for others. The bottom line is that we are all subject to blind spots all of the time.
Even when we are trying to make good decisions, we can be affected by assumptions that we
don't even know we're making.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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LaTonya Wilkins: Give this example a lot where I worked with a lot of tech companies. One of
these tech executive was like, There's one woman on the team and I don't know why she feels
like she doesn't belong? And she tells me that I make her feel like she doesn't belong. I'm like,
okay, and he's like, am I cool? What do you think? What's going on? Tell me about your
relationship. I invite her to all the meetings, I invite her everywhere, I tried to ask her opinion, I
tried one-on-ones with her, and I was like, let's shift this conversation and let's think about the
last time you had an emergency or like maybe your product went down or there's a fire drill.
Who did you call? I called these colleagues, all white men, every single one. I didn't tell him that,
he saw it, and he was able to say, wow, I have bias. I have affinity bias, and that's what we were
talking about, affinity bias. I talked about this in my book, Terrible Three, affinity bias is one of
them, and he's like, wow, I didn't even think about that. I didn't even think. I was like, that's what
she's talking about. He's like, yeah, I really need to look at this in other areas of my life because
I think I do have that bias and we talked about the reasons behind that, and he acknowledged is
not because these guys are more qualified. It's just because the people were probably more
comfortable talking to them because of who they are. They're like bros. That's how you get to
that. You let people, you lead them in a direction as a coach for them to be able to gain those
insights themselves and to be able to look deeper and see what deeper behaviors they need to
change, what deeper behaviors they need to question. A lot of them, they need to question the
very existence of their leadership and how they approach it.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Denise Loyd: Affinity bias as an example of a type of heuristic we use. Kahneman and
Tversky initially identified three heuristics that people are very likely to make. We'll discuss
these three in more detail. First, availability. We make decisions on the information that is most
readily available or easy to bring to mind. For example, you have to make a decision on whether
to use a new supplier. There are few different options but only one of them has been marketing
to you. You've seen the e-mails from the web come through on a daily basis. The supplier is on
your mind. No other suppliers have reached out to you and you have to make a quick decision,
so you choose the supplier without considering other options. This is an example of availability
bias. Second, representativeness, where we make decisions based on stereotypes instead of
base rates. For example, imagine you have two job candidates coming to interview for a
position as an executive assistant. You know that you want to hire someone who's outgoing and
extroverted because you often ask your assistant to accompany you on sales calls. The HR
manager tells you that one of the candidates has been trained as an artist and the other as a
personal trainer or fitness instructor. Both candidates have the necessary skills to be your
executive assistant. Based on these descriptions, you assume that the personal trainer is the
more extroverted individual but when you actually meet the candidates, you discover that the
artist is much more comfortable interacting with new people. You made an assumption based
on the stereotype instead of the individual qualities of the person. This is an example of the
representativeness heuristic. Third. Anchoring. We make decisions based on a point and get
stuck around that point. For example, you're working on drawing up financial plans for next year.
For the past three years, you've consistently planned for your business to go up by two percent
from the year before, so you do the same thing this year, even though you have a new potential
stream of revenue this year, that could potentially increase your business by at least 10 percent.
Getting stuck at that two percent mark is an example of anchoring.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
There are many other heuristics that have been identified. But the examples we've discussed
here give you a brief idea of what we mean by heuristics and the bias decision-making they can
potentially lead to. Bringing awareness to how we make decisions as humans can help us make
better decisions as leaders.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Lesson 3 – 2 Making Effective Decisions - Skill Development
Making Effective Decisions - Skill Development | Coursera
Denise Loyd: The first step to improving our decision making as leaders is to know how it
works and to understand where the biases may appear. Know yourself.
Another reason it's important for each of us to dive deeply into our own values and goals is
because these influence how we make decisions. They are lenses through which we make
decisions and can shape the outcomes. It's also helpful to know what sort of things trigger
certain decisions because our individual differences can influence our decision making as well.
Are you afraid of disappointing a boss? Are you eager to get your team to like you, how we see
ourselves and where we see ourselves going influences how we make decisions?
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Jack Goncalo: Well I would say in retrospect now 25 years later I can say like I navigated it well
at the time it did not feel like that. So I think that sometimes when you're in a fork on the road at
the time it's scary. I was, when you have a plan and you can't pursue it. And also when I told my
father, bless his heart that I'm switching to psychology and I'm going to study creativity. I mean I
thought you were going to major in business and get, how are you going to pay the bills with
this? It was very, and my father was a very he had a business degree, he worked at Intel he
came from a really impoverished background in Portugal. And so very practical how you going
to pay the bills kind of, and, so there was that pressure to where it's, a little bit, it wasn't terrible,
but there was definitely an element of shock and surprise on my parents’ part that I was
switching out. But I'm so glad I did, I'm so grateful to that calculus class for giving me a C minus.
I still remember that grade because I don't think it would have put me on a path that I would truly
enjoy, which is what I'm doing now. I would have been who knows where, but I don't think I
would be enjoying the work as I do now, so.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Jeff Brown: I think it's important to be explicit about what your values are and by that I really
mean what are the must have is what are the things that make you who you are. Not sometimes
value statements can get a little fuzzy or mixed up with, this is what we do rather than who we
are and how we do what we do. And the exact products that we offer or services that we offer or
those sorts of things may evolve over time But there ought to be something core to the
organization that defines who you are and how we work together and so forth and that you need
to be true to no matter what's going on in the world.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Denise Loyd: Recognize the barriers and the blind spots, what external factors can influence
your decision making? Two that are present for almost everyone are time constraints and social
constraints. If you feel time pressure to make a decision, this is going to affect your ability to
think through all of the implications. The people we work with can shape our decisions as well.
Are we trying to conform to what we think they want us to do or are we trying to stand out and
be unique?
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Kari Keating: We bring our biases into teamwork and we imagine and sort of these sort of, selfserving biases that we think, well, I'm on this project because I, want to learn how to do market
forecasting a little bit better. So that's why I'm here. I'm kind of excited to practice that and I want
to make friends. So we assume that that's why everybody else around the table, is there. Well,
everybody else around the table has, they have different reasons for being there. So we need to
surface that. And instead a lot of times if these teams are sort of left on their own and we don't
coach or teach them, they'll never get to those conversations. And they'll labor along for weeks
without realizing that maybe, this person is not showing up or they're not maybe delivering on
time. It's because we have nine times out of 10, we haven't taken the time to find out what's
really motivating that person to be in the team work in the first place.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Denise Loyd: Utilize social networks, don't make decisions in a vacuum. Find people who can
help you look at a problem critically, who might be able to shed light on the situation to ensure
you have the full information before you come into a decision. One of the myths of effective
leadership comes from the great man theory that a single leader affects all of the outcomes and
it is the traits of that person that makes a difference. But if we've learned leading is a
relationship or a series of relationships and therefore effective decision making requires valuing
all aspects of those relationships including the individuals who are part of them.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Kari Keating: So I guess team culture for me comes back to this idea of building these trusting
relationships of, I'll say both bonding and bridging social capital. So I'm kind of a student of
social capital and the importance of building norms and networks of trust and reciprocity.
Because that facilitates cooperation and communication and when you're on a team, it would be
best if you look forward to the teamwork, you look forward to being at the meetings, you look
forward to being with those people. I'm thinking about teams that I'm on now faculty teams and
task forces that I'm on now. And I look forward to being around those people and I think it's
because we've taken the time to get to know one another and we have all been able to iterate
why it's important, why we feel motivated to be there
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Denise Loyd: Develop a problem solving practice, think about what you need to be the best
decision maker, you can be, maybe you create a template for yourself to think about what's
important in making decisions. One example of this might be to list the different options,
consider different outcomes etcetera, you might be interested in creating a decision tree and
guessing the probabilities of the different outcomes. Having a framework that you can use, gives
you some structure to remind you to avoid using heuristics when you need to go deeper.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Jim Luckman: So I remember reading the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People many, many
years ago. And it was mind bending book for me because I thought it was so fundamental to all
of the right things to do in life, but the most important one was, how do you sharpen the saw?
He used the term sharpen the saw, this is Stephen Covey's book. And what that means is how
do you take time out to actually improve yourself? And you've got to decide exactly what it is
you want to work on and what you want to improve? So I've got two thoughts that connect to
that one is an Olympic ice skater. If you think about what they do on a continuous basis is they
take any problem gap that they may have in doing whatever they do the twirls and all that. And
they have a coach and they narrow their practice down to that one area that they're trying to
build. So it's a small practice area but it's continuous and they do it over and over and over
again until they close that problem gap. So that's one mindset that you should have if you want
to practice this leadership thing.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
The second thing is and I do this still today and that is I use the PDCA learning cycle as a
mechanism. And inside that PDCA I do a reflection once a week and look for the gaps and say
next week I'm going to work on these gaps to close. So for example the leader might say over
the next week I have four meetings with my subordinates. I went to consciously practice humble
inquiry in those meetings or the next four meetings this week and at the end of the week I'll see
how I did. And then you do a reflection on that. And the leader might say well in two of the
meetings I didn't get really deep into the content at all. I was really paying attention on how I'm
asking questions and two of them I blew it completely. And something drew me into that
conversation and made me want to tell them what I was thinking as opposed to allowing them to
think about the problem situation. So you can use this PDCA cycle on a weekly basis and say I
want to practice on that this week. I want to take a realistic look at how I did to try to build my
personal skills at asking humble inquiry questions and then I'm going to do it again next week
and see if I get better at it.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Gopesh Anand: As a leader what I found as being important and I've learned this throughout
the years. This is not something that I was good at right when I was running the business
initially is that you have to make challenging decisions and own up to them, right? So there will
be times when you have to let go of somebody. There will be times when you have to give them
a performance appraisal that's not looking very pretty. There will be times when you'll have to
tell a supplier that you're going to not buy from them anymore. So those are things that you
have to make decisions on. And those are going to be tough decisions and you have to make
them and US leaders are going to be responsible for them ultimately. What I find people doing
which is not good for leadership is making excuses for everything. So you have to own up to the
tough decisions that you make.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Denise Loyd: Where do we go from here? Decision making is core to our role as humans and
it's especially important to leaders who are making decisions that affect organizations and the
people associated with them, developing a keen understanding of how we make decisions, the
heuristics that we use, the biases that emerge and the potential blind spots allows us to
individually develop a more thoughtful approach to decision making as leaders.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Lesson 4-1 Making Ethical Decisions
Making Ethical Decisions
Denise Loyd: Enron, Ford, Wells Fargo, Volkswagen. What do these four companies have in
common? Well, each has to come to a large-scale ethical breach. Each one has made
headlines and not for the reasons they wanted to. Whether the accounting missteps of Enron,
the Pinto fires at Ford, generating fake accounts to make sales at Wells Fargo, or using
technology that bypasses the emission systems to pass tests at Volkswagen. These stories are
examples of organizational-level failures. However, these organizational level failures all started
with poor decisions made by leaders and subsequently by their employees. It's easy to blame
leaders, blame employees, say that they had bad intentions or were seeking to serve their own
interests at the expense of others. But what we know about these examples is that unethical
behavior in organizations is more complicated than simply bad people doing bad things. Often
it's well-intentioned people making bad decisions. As leaders, we have the responsibility of
making decisions that are significant in terms of both quantity and quality. Decisions leaders
make every day impact people's lives. Because of this, it's important to consider the ethical
implications of our decisions at work. In this video, we consider the concept of ethical
decision-making to provide information that will help us from falling victim to the factors that lead
us towards these unethical decisions as leaders or as employees in our organizations.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Ethics generally refers to the evaluation of decisions or behaviors as good versus bad or right
versus wrong. Ethical decision-making refers to a particular branch of research on how humans
engage in decision-making, more specifically, the way in which we make decisions in alignment
with or contrast to ethical principles, influenced by personal and cultural values. Ethical
decision-making is important to leadership and business because of the ethical implications of
decisions made by leaders and their teams every single day. For many years, business ethics
was taught through a normative lens, largely drawing on philosophical frameworks to determine
what leaders in business should or should not do. Normative ethics refers to the principles or
standards of what is determined to be ethical behavior and there are three primary normative
lenses. First, utilitarianism, which is concerned with providing the most value to the most people.
Second, deontology, which is concerned with determining ethical rules. Third, virtue ethics,
which is concerned with exercising virtues or ethical values and developing an ethical character.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Behavioral ethics, in contrast to normative ethics, is the field interested in how actually people
respond to ethical dilemmas and seeks to understand the factors that influence our decisionmaking. It answers the question, why do we make unethical decisions even when we do not
intend to do so. Research in behavioral ethics explores individual and situational forces that act
on the decision-making process to understand why people might make a decision that we would
generally deem ethical or unethical. The field of behavioral ethics has provided important
insights for leaders looking to improve their ethical decision-making.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Jeff Brown: I think it's important to understand what our benchmarks are going to be for ethical
behavior and at the lowest common denominator as just things like staying in line with the law
and filing the report you need to report, those things. But I hope that we're aspiring to be more
than that and the more than that to me, does come back to the organization's values. Why does
the organization exist? How do we want to do the work that we want to do? Part of that is going
to be cultural, where you're from, where your workers you from, and so forth? But I think one
has to be explicit about that and true to that and sometimes it requires updating.
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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
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Denise Loyd: What have we learned from behavioral ethics to help us understand how people
make ethical or unethical decisions to help leaders do better. I'll highlight some of the key
findings from this field. In particular, I'll discuss human values, bounded ethicality, and framing
effects. First, people don't always act in alignment with their values. Knowing our values is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for ethical decision-making. Most people who make
unethical decisions do not set out to do so. Yet, there are bad apples, but behavioral ethics is
interested in the good people who make bad decisions. Why do we act in alignment with our
values? One reason is that we aren't explicit about them. Being explicit about our values means
knowing what we will stand up for and what we won't make trade-offs for. The extent to which
any individual is willing to violate a value or a principle tells us what they truly value. Let's think
about why we might violate a particular value. Let's take honesty as an example. Do you value
honesty? Well, have you ever told a lie? If you violated the value of honesty for yourself, why did
you do it? Was there pressure to look a certain way, for example, to lie about knowing
something that you didn't know? Was there something valuable you might lose by telling the
truth? Maybe you are protecting yourself or someone else. Did you lie to save someone's
feelings? As you can easily see there're various fairly legitimate reasons why we might violate
this value of honesty.
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Kari Keating: I would think a fundamental mindset for leadership is knowing what your core
values are. That sounds nice on the face of it, but if we were to go around and ask our friends
and colleagues, like person on the street interview, what are your core values? People are that
arresting, you can't just name that right off the bat. I think spending time and doing some
exercises around core value identification is helpful. Over the past few years I've done some
work on that myself and can identify that minor connection, growth, freedom, and authenticity.
Those four, I run decisions through that filter at my core values filter. When things are coming at
me at warp speed during the day, sometimes I need to take a breath and pull out the connection
and growth and freedom and authenticity and run the next decision through those filters and
what's going to move me closer to those values that I suppose.
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Denise Loyd: Further, when we make trade-offs and behave in opposition to our values, we are
really good at justifying why we lie to maintain our ethical self-concept; the idea that we are
ethical people. Our brains are very good at making excuses for our behavior. I did this to spare
her feelings. I couldn't lose my job, and so on and so forth. A big problem is that an even
smaller violation of values and the willingness to justify the decision can lead to the slippery
slope effect. Research shows that our brains find it easier to engage in larger lies after we have
already engaged in smaller lies. However, if we are explicit in what we value and we disrupt the
process of justifying our bad decisions, we're much less likely to fall down the slippery slope.
The second key idea that we'll explore from behavioral ethics is the concept of bounded
ethicality. Bounded rationality, a concept developed by Herbert Simon, suggests that we are
“satisficers”. In other words, that we will take shortcuts to make acceptable decisions as
opposed to making optimal decisions. The field of behavioral ethics, the basis of bounded
rationality is found in the concept of bounded ethicality.
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Bounded ethicality basically means that our ability to make optimal ethical decisions is limited by
internal and situational pressures. Moreover, research in bounded ethicality has highlighted
specific pressures that we face that influence our ability to make ethical decisions.
Psychological biases that are well-documented in decision-making research also apply to
ethical decision-making. One example is overconfidence bias, which leads us to believe that
we are better than others in some skill and the same is true of our confidence in our ability to be
ethical. If we naturally believe we are more ethical than others, we are less likely to pay
attention to the decision-making process in moments of ethical dilemmas which can lead to
unethical decisions. Another example is confirmation bias or the tendency to seek out
information that enhances or confirms our own beliefs about ourselves. If we're facing an ethical
dilemma we may seek out information to align with the decision that we want to make
regardless of whether that decision is the ethical one. This allows us to rationalize the decision
even when it deviates from our values.
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Group and society pressure can also influence our ability to make ethical decisions. Our
supervisors and leaders are evaluating us and have the power to affect our careers. Our
employees watch us and model our behavior. The pressure to behave in certain ways is really
powerful. It's even more strongly influenced by the role of social media and constant sharing of
personal and professional information. The desire to succeed, the goal to be the best, the hope
that we can satisfy our supervisors and our employees are all pressures that act on our choices
and influence how we make decisions. The pressure to achieve certain outcomes can shape
our behavior to encourage us to take shortcuts or act in other ways that go against what we
value.
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Organizations are structured in hierarchies, setting up opportunities for authority pressure and
bias. Further, incentive structures are at the heart of most organizations. Incentives themselves
are designed to affect our behavior and this does not always work out to be ethical. Let's
consider the Wells Fargo scandal in which sales associates were caught creating fake accounts
to achieve sales goals. Research has shown that certain types of goals and incentives can
actually facilitate unethical behavior because we're focused on the goal or the end without
paying attention to the process or the means.
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Related to the contract of bounded ethicality is the third key finding from behavioral ethics that
I'll review here. That's the idea that we make decisions differently based on how situations are
framed. The basis of this comes from prospect theory which demonstrates that if we frame a
problem in terms of a gain, we are more risk averse. But if we frame that same problem in terms
of a loss we tend to be more risk-seeking. Applied to business ethics, research shows that if we
frame problems as business problems we often make different decisions than if we frame them
as other problems. A rather well-known example of this comes from the detailed analysis of the
Ford Pinto fires from the 1970s.
Ford begun selling the Ford Pinto in the early 1970s and subsequently a series of rear-end
collisions led to gas tank explosions and deaths. There's a substantial amount of research and
analysis on this case from a business ethics perspective, a safety perspective, and a legal
perspective which can be found online. Dennis Gioia, a business professor at Penn State in a
1992 article in the Journal of Business Ethics identified the cost-benefit analysis that the
company had performed to compare the cost of replacing the gas tanks with the potential
number of lives that could be saved by doing so. By framing this as a business problem, the
value of human life was reduced to a number on a sheet of paper in a cost-benefit analysis. This
case and many others like it led Anton Brunson and Kristen Smith-Crowe to review the business
ethics literature and develop a model to compare the relationship between intentionality and
ethical outcomes.
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Through their review of the research, they determined that being an immoral frame compared to
a business or legal frame leads to greater moral awareness and has an influence on how
people make decisions in the face of ethical implications. This is really important because it
suggests that the cognitive frame of the decision-maker influences to what extent they are
aware of the moral implications of the decision right in front of them. Let's tie this back to the
Pinto case. If the decision about whether to replace the gas tanks is evaluated in a business
frame as it was in the cost-benefit analysis, this is likely to mean that those making the decision
were not even aware of the ethical implications, because they were outside of that type of
decision frame. A great deal of research demonstrates that framing decisions in terms of money
or self-gain can lead to more unethical outcomes. While framing decisions in terms of the impact
on various stakeholders can enhance the potential for ethical outcomes. Being an ethical
decision maker as a leader requires recognizing the barriers to ethical leadership so we can
practice making more ethical decisions.
Previously saved note: If we're facing an ethical dilemma we may seek out information to align
with the decision that we want to make regardless of whether that decision is the ethical one.
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Lesson 4-2 Making Ethical Decisions - Skill Development
Making Ethical Decisions - Skill Development
Denise Loyd: Like all elements of leadership, growth and development, improving the capacity
for making ethical decisions, starts with awareness and continues with practice.
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Gopash Anand: And then I think the most important thing is that you have to be honest to
yourself, right, am I doing this for the right reasons? Am I making a decision for the right
reasons? Is it because of the vision that I have for my organization? Is this going against my
own values and whatever those values are, right? At some point in time it's Abby, is the
business going to survive some point in time it's going to be, is this right for the person? Should
we be giving this person another chance? Whether that's a supplier or an employee, right. So,
those are things that I like to do before making the tough decisions and then once I've decided I
go ahead and make those decisions.
Denise Loyd: Being clear in your own values is related to being morally aware. Your values are
filters for how you make decisions. The more clearly you have identified and committed to your
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values, the more likely you will ignore the temptations present and act in alignment with those
values. If you know what values you want to enact, you can let these guide your decisionmaking.
Kari Keating: It's very hard, so I'm a certified dare to lead facilitator through the work of Dr.
Brené Brown. And through the dare to lead process there's a core values exercise where folks
look at a set of more than a 100 values. Honesty, spirituality, achievement then the list goes on
and when you do core values work you sort of start with this big inventory. And you narrow it
down, maybe you pick the ten that resonate with you the most. And then you walk away for a
little while and you come back and you pick the five or six that resonate the most and you just
sort of keep narrowing it down. But over time you kind of watch yourself and watch your own
behavior. I think that's one of the important parts of leadership development. When we're in a
social context or in a decision-making context, to have this ability to sort of dis embody for a
moment and watch yourself in that situation. And look at your own behavior and as an indicator
of what's important to me, why am I making this decision right now? Why am I saying to myself,
I think I won't go to that networking meeting this evening because my child has a piano recital. I
really feel I need to be at the piano recital. So okay, so family for me outweighs socialization and
social networking. So just over time watching your own behavior to sort of get indicators for
what to hear your inner voice, it's important.
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Denise Loyd: There are individual and situational factors that can turn us away from our values
and encourage us to make decisions that are unethical. One framework that captures these
barriers in a way that is easy to remember was developed by C.K Gunsalus, Director of the
National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics. It's a pneumonic that helps us
easily remember some of the most important barriers that get in the way of our ethical
decision-making. [MUSIC]
I spent the early part of my career investigating people who had gotten themselves into trouble
on universities. Highly educated, smart people who never imagined looking at a job or career
ending problem. Over time, I began to see patterns in how those problems developed and
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became more and more interested in what it would take to educate and prevent such problems.
This developed into what I call the concept of career tragedies, with tragedies being an
acronym, representing some of the most common pitfalls.
A lot of things that get people into trouble or things you don't know, you don't know particularly
at the beginning of your career. We think putting some thought into understanding that career
tragedies can help you identify and we hope avoid the problems they lead to. When you
encounter some kind of problem, a difficult conversation or a dilemma. One of the first things to
do is figure out which parts of the problem you own and that's where the tragedy start. T stands
for temptation. You know what temptation feels like. It's something you really want. We're all
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tempted at times, we're all human. It's how we deal with the temptations though, that define us.
The RS for rationalization, it is always possible to rationalize any questionable thing you want
to do. It's broken anyway. It's not very much. I'll put it back soon. Nobody will notice. Those are
all rationalizations. If you find yourself rationalizing your behavior and you know that feeling,
that's a signal to you to step back and reflect.
Then there's ambition. You really want the promotion, the bonus, the recognition, the paper.
Whatever it is that you're aiming for, it's okay to be driven. Are you using your ambition as an
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excuse to rationalize dubious choices? What do you do when your values are in conflict with
actions that would serve your ambition? The G stands for group and authority pressure. We
all know what peer pressure feels like. Come on, everyone else is doing it. Or an authority figure
who directs you to cut a corner and you don't want to be seen as the difficult one, the boss told
me to. You are still always responsible for your own actions. Entitlement is next. I worked so
hard, I deserve this, I earned it, they owe me. Feeling entitled is always a red flag that you may
be getting into trouble because we're not entitled to break the rules or cheat no matter how
much you think you deserve it. The D stands for deception. Sometimes the deception is of
other people sometimes it's of yourself.
Did you say something that intentionally misled another person? That's a pretty good clue that
you just told a lie? Do you know what it feels like when you're deceiving yourself?
Incrementalism is maybe the single thing that gets more early career folks into trouble than
anything else. Incrementalism is when you take that first little step and there are no
consequences. You do something then that's called normalizing deviance. I'm a good person, I
did that. So, must be something a good person would do. So you take another little step pretty
soon you've gone someplace in a lot of little steps that you never would have gone in one big
one.
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Embarrassment is important to think about and also gets a lot of people into trouble. Are you
too embarrassed to admit a mistake? So you try to hide it? Are you able to own it? If you don't
know the answer, being able to say I'm sorry or I made a mistake or I don't know could I find out
and get back to you are all critical success skills. Finally, the S stands for stupid systems. We
all work in organizations that have stupid systems. These are policies that seem to make your
job harder or are just stupid. When do you work within them and when do you work around
them? You must be able to recognize the boundaries between things that are stupid yet you can
work with and choices that compromise your values or boundaries in ways that you're not willing
to cross.
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A lot of the tragedies are things that you feel temptation, rationalization, ambition. You feel the
pressure from others, you feel entitled. Some of them are things you have to recognize that are
external, like authority pressure or a stupid system. No matter where it comes from, you are
responsible for your own conduct. Knowing the tragedies, recognizing when you're facing one
and protecting yourself against them is your job. No one owns your reputation but you. [MUSIC]
Denise Loyd: Evidence suggests that simply being aware of the moral or ethical dimensions
potentially present in an issue can help us to be more thoughtful in our decision-making.
Research has shown that simply having a moral frame versus a business frame can change the
way people make decisions. Encouraging them to be more thoughtful of how their decisions will
impact others.
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Ron Myers: Well, the reason I wanted something that was more than just leadership or just
ethics, is that the combination of the two is really critical piece of it. I've gone through a situation
where I was in a business and we had had some, our business pretty much collapsed because
there was an ethical lapse. One of the leaders in the business and that influenced me. This is
also at a time when you had some pretty major ethical scandals that had happened. There was
the Enron scandal, which of course is one that everyone knows, but there are a number of other
scandals that happened at the same time. And it really made me think about how ethics plays
into leadership and why these ethical lapses happen because these aren't bad people, case of
some of these large scandals. I knew people who were in leadership positions and I said these
are good people. How did this happen? So I really wanted to take that course of studying, the
connection between ethics and leadership to me. There's no disconnection; there's a set of
ethics. And when we think about the definition of ethics, really ethics are a set of rules and
moral principles that guide you and whatever that ethical basis is how decisions are often made.
So, leadership and ethics tie hand in hand. And if you can influence those ethics, that's a very
important part of leadership. And I think there is a more responsibility for leaders to consider
how their behavior drives ethics and how it drives a cultural organization.
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Denise Loyd: We've explored some of the key findings from behavioral ethics related to values,
bounded ethicality, and framing. Our understanding of how things go wrong and how people act
out of alignment with their values can help us improve our own decision-making as leaders.
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Lesson 5-1 Maintaining Psychological Well-Being
Maintaining Psychological Well-Being | Coursera
Kari Keating: The ongoing work of leadership is really hard. Recently, a Gallup survey found
that managers are reporting an increase in stress and burnout and a decrease in physical wellbeing and work-life balance. Do you feel it? Eighty-four percent of managers internalize blame
for their employees’ burnout. It's a lot to shoulder. Being in a state of exhaustion and imbalance
has implications for how you work, as well as how you lead. This state of leader burnout is real.
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Jeffrey Loewenstein: It's very difficult to lead other people if you are exhausted, stressed,
frustrated, lost, confused, and so forth. So at some level to be here, to listen, to be in a place
where I can be considerate and listen to someone else, means I can't be so absorbed in my
own needs that otherwise I won't hear them, I'll be so focused on me and what I need and care
about, I won't be there for you. Leadership is about leading others. If I'm not in a place where I
can actually turn my attention and be caring and considerate and concerned and attending to
others, then it's not going to work. I also have to have some sense of my role and it's very
common, especially in newer leaders, to think about I am in a position of authority, therefore, I
have to do it. There's an ego aspect to this as opposed to I have to ensure that we accomplish
it; I have to do it, and that puts enormous burdens on ourselves and is almost always
counterproductive because it pushes others away, it decreases their energy, their effort, their
insight, and it's a self-perpetuating negative spiral. So, self-management, you can think of it in
terms of time management and so forth, but to me, it's, do I have the energy? Do I have this
sense of security to be here for us and for us to do this together?
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Kari Keating: We need energy and security to lead others effectively, to lead a life of our own in
which we thrive and in which we flourish. As the saying goes, you can't pour from an empty cup.
It's important for leaders to pay attention to this so they can be the best versions of themselves
as leaders and model that for people who are influenced by them.
How can we take ownership of ourselves and our leadership growth to put ourselves on a path
toward flourishing? Well, this requires that we pay attention to our psychological well-being.
What do we mean by psychological well-being? Psychological well-being is basically the
intersection of feeling good and living well, flourishing or thriving in our everyday lives. It's a core
element of our emotional and mental health and that matters to leaders whose responsibility
includes empowering others to solve complex problems.
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Oscar Ybarra: Well-being, we've talked about meaning, and that's how some people think
about well-being now as in this broader sense of purpose and coherence and significance.
Traditionally, well-being has been studied by psychologists, economists, and other folks as
meaning affect, the calculus of positive and negative emotions or experiences you have maybe
a day-to-day or over the course of a week, I'm feeling good or I'm feeling better. Then the other
component is more of a cognitive component like, I'm satisfied with my life, I'm happy with
where things are. Those are the two traditional pieces of well-being.
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Kari Keating: Psychological well-being involves three primary dimensions. Hedonic wellbeing, feelings of enjoyment, and pleasure, Eudaimonic well-being, feelings of meaning and
purpose, and Resilience, coping mechanisms including socio-emotional skills and healthy
problem-solving. Psychological well-being is not about being happy all the time or avoiding
negative feelings and difficult experiences, rather, it's about navigating the difficult moments in
life in healthy and adaptive ways. Let's briefly explore each of these dimensions of
psychological well-being.
Hedonic well-being refers to experiencing and seeking out feelings of pleasure and satisfaction
while avoiding pain or discomfort. A tasty ice cream cone, purchasing a gift for yourself, finally
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getting that job so you can post about it on social media, checking a task off a to-do list, getting
our point across in a meeting all contributes to hedonic well-being. These states of pleasure are
important, we need to feel good to feel positive emotions at times. Evidence suggests that
hedonic well-being is often intense in the moment and fades quickly after that high wears off.
This leads to the concept of the hedonic treadmill, which describes how we achieve a state of
happiness, the novelty wears off, and then we have to go seek that same level of happiness
again. Research shows that we each have a happiness set point. Sonja Lyubomirsky and
colleagues have outlined three elements of this set point. They say that 50 percent is
determined by genetics, 10 percent is determined by circumstances outside of our control, and
40 percent is within our control. In other words, over half of our happiness is influenced by
factors we can't control. But flourishing is more than just feeling good.
Eudaimonic well-being refers to happiness achieved through self-actualization and having
meaningful purpose in life. Eudaimonia is a concept often attributed to Aristotle in his writings
about ethics in the fourth century BC. Aristotle believed that the well-lived life was one in which
each living thing lives in service of fulfilling its ultimate purpose. In other words, a life of meaning
is one in which we are seeking to reach our potential to become the best versions of ourselves.
The concept of dharma in Eastern philosophies is closely related. Research on the difference
between happiness and purpose shows that these often operate in opposition to each other.
Which is why it's important for us to cultivate both. Feelings of pleasure and satisfaction are
often more self-focused, present focused, and resources focused. While feelings of meaning
and purpose are more other-focused, future-oriented, and often not always pleasant, as they
may come with anxiety and uncertainty. In the process of seeking meaning, we're going to face
moments of discomfort and negative emotions. Think about something that you've done that
you're really proud of, earning a degree, completing a difficult project or maybe something more
personal like buying a home, meeting a partner, or having children. None of those things comes
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from a place of constant positivity. Those accomplishments are born of blood, sweat, and tears,
moments of doubt, hours focused on a single task, and sometimes physical and emotional pain.
If flourishing requires both the positive and the negative, then it means we're going to need
some coping mechanisms that help us recover and even make meaning out of the hard times.
That's where resilience comes in. The third dimension of psychological well-being.
Resilience refers to the process of successfully adapting too difficult or challenging life
experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility. Resilience is the
ability to bounce back from adversity emotionally and psychologically. Given that life necessarily
hands you challenges both at work and at home, the ability to navigate these in a healthy way is
highly correlated with psychological well-being.
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Psychologists Susan David, has spent her career studying what she calls emotional agility.
Emotional Agility is being flexible with your thoughts and feelings. It is key to well-being and
success. It involves choosing how to respond to your emotional warning system. To cultivate
resilience as leaders, we can focus on three areas. First, connection, while alone time can be
helpful to recharge when you've been stressed.
It's often better to seek connection and support from friends, family, or even from a professional.
Isolation will amplify our tendency to judge our emotions as negative. Contribution, times of
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stress, and imbalance can make us feel helpless. Gaining back some form of control by
contributing can give us a sense of agency. Are there any initiatives you can contribute to? A
day that you can spend volunteering, mentoring a student or delivering something to someone
in need? Finally, compassion. Be patient and kind to yourself and to others, accept the whole
range of your emotions. Dr. David suggests that we become comfortable being uncomfortable.
She says, discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
Why are we talking about psychological well-being in a leadership course? Well, think about the
challenges that leaders face on a regular basis. Pressures to meet goals and KPIs,
communicating effectively, making decisions that are good for the business and good for the
people in it. And of course, ensuring that value is delivered to the customer. Leaders who can
maintain well-being, set a standard for us to follow. We are less likely to be inspired by someone
who is constantly worn out, on edge and unable to support us in the ways that we need to
develop.
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Denise Loyd: Sometimes we talk about the fallacy of efficiency and thinking that the best route
is the fastest route. Maybe confusing efficiency for speed. Maybe that's a better way of thinking
about it. Confusing efficiency for speed and what I mean by that is when we don't do things well
the first time, we oftentimes either have really poor execution and just failures or you end up
having to just redo things or it ends up taking much longer to get to the point that we would have
like to get to earlier on.
Kari Keating: Research shows that higher levels of psychological well-being are correlated with
being more productive, more socially engaged, and even higher levels of income. Psychological
well-being is also more likely to be related to self-enhancing behaviors, suggesting that feeling
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good and doing well facilitates a cycle of personal improvement. If we can practice flourishing in
our own work and as leaders, then we can lead better and more meaningful work lives. This
means we're likely to have more positive outcomes for ourselves and are more likely to
positively influence our teams as well.
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Lesson 5-2 Maintaining Psychological Well-Being - Skill Development
Maintaining Psychological Well-Being - Skill Development
Larry Gies: Yeah, for me, it's not a burden, it's a beautiful thing. I had an employee at work on
Thursday of last week and he comes into our office, his home is a plane flight away.
I asked him, when are you going home tonight? Because he usually goes home Thursday
nights. He says, "Well, I'm not going home." I say, why are you not going home? He says, "Well,
just some issues at home and so on and so forth." I said do you want to talk about it? He goes
"No, I've got it." I said, well, I think you should go home. He goes, "No, I'm just going to stay
here for the weekend and we got a lot of work going on," so on, so forth. I close the door and I
sat down on the chair and I crossed the line because he didn't want to talk about it. I said, "Why
aren't you going home?" He told me and we had a nice long chat, but I understood what he was
saying. But I just really give him one more push and said, "You really should go." Then I
followed up with a couple of texts, not emails, just some texts. On Sunday I got a note from him
and he said, "Thanks for the push, it really helped." He went home. Simple stuff, it wasn't a
burden, it was beautiful. I can't think of as I'm tearing up right now, I can't think of anything over
the last two weeks that was more impactful on what I did to one person. But it's the ripple effect
because that one person will now do it for 10 more and those 10 will do it for 10 more. It takes
time as a leader to seriously take that extra moment to close the door, sit down across the table
and say, what's bothering you? Because then they'll do it. That's the modeling you do. It takes a
long time, but you have to do it. It's not a burden, it's a beautiful thing.
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Kari Keating: How do we focus on and practice developing our own psychological well-being?
How do we know if we're doing a good job at it? I'll break these strategies into two categories.
First, do your best to maximize the positive and second, create practices for navigating the
negative. Maximizing the positive means knowing what matters to your well-being and setting
aside time to intentionally cultivate those areas. It doesn't have to be done all at once, this is a
lifelong journey, but ignoring your sweet spots will not help you grow.
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Martin Seligman, psychologist and one of the founding researchers in positive psychology
developed the PERMA Model for flourishing in life. PERMA refers to positive emotions,
engagement, positive relationships, meaning, and achievement. This means looking for
ways to develop and sustain moments of hedonic pleasure while finding ways to explore
purpose and meaning and making connections to create support systems.
How often do you find ways to feel moments of joy in your work? Do you have a sense of
meaning in your work? Do you have relationships that lift you up instead of wear you down?
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Oscar Ybarra: I think about meaning, and it started off in a very academic way. I got into the
purpose business by studying loneliness and the lack of social relationships and how that
predicts purpose, actually lower purpose. It's just another outcome associated with having good
relationships, when we have this broader sense of meaning in our lives. The research in the
psychological literature now talks more about meaning more broadly and purpose as being one
element of that. There's a couple of other pieces that add to meaning and one of them is
coherence and for all those students of organizations out there, the whole idea of sense-making
I think fits perfectly with this. We just have a need to make sense of things and have a sense
that our view of ourselves, the world makes sense, it's coherent. Because if it's chaotic, it's hard
to act on the world. The other one is significance or the idea that you matter and that you're also
providing value to others because that's partly what leads to you mattering is providing value to
others. It's those three pieces that for me make up meaning. Purpose is one of them and
central because it's important to have goals and aims in life. But they all interact. It's hard to
really define a purpose or your goals or your aims if your life is a bit chaotic. It suggests to me
that then you should probably be working a bit more on the coherence piece.
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Kari Keating: Finally, let's look at how to navigate the negatives. Most of this involves setting
realistic boundaries. This might mean determining what you will say yes to and what you will
say no to. It might mean turning off your email or chat messages at a certain time. Your ability to
set boundaries is highly dependent on your work, the culture, and the demands of your job.
However, it can be done and it is incredibly important to developing as a leader.
Jeffrey Loewenstein: The old joke about time management is that there are two lessons. The
first lesson is how to say no to things you don't want to do and the second lesson is how to say
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no to things you do want to do. The point of this, as a leader it is tempting to want to do more
yourself because you think you're better at it, because you think it's your responsibility, because
it allows you to exercise power. Whatever the particular needs you're fulfilling, there's a
tendency to take on too much and that's in terms of not delegating. It's also in terms of not
allowing some problems to happen and that's a failure of prioritization. There are only so many
things you can accomplish and if you try to accomplish them all, you will run yourself into the
ground. A fair amount of time management and energy management is having some sense of I
know that that is imperfect and I'm going to live with it because there are these other things that
are more important for us to excel on right now and so I will accommodate that. I will also not
take on more than I should so that I can accomplish the things that I know I need to accomplish
effectively.
Kari Keating: In this video, we have focused on individual psychological well-being, especially
as it pertains to leaders. There's also substantial evidence that leaders can strongly influence
the psychological well-being of their employees, mitigating cultures of burnout and bore out.
Like so many leadership practices, it starts with a deep look at ourselves. The metaphor of
putting our oxygen mask on first before helping others secure theirs, that's tempting to use. But
it implies that we only need self-care when we're in a crisis. But the demands of leadership
require a lifestyle of self-care and modeling it for those around us.
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Module 2 Wrap-Up
Module 2 closing
Kari Keating: Strategic self-leadership. We just had some long conversations about that
leading the self and starting with the self and kind of ending the conversations around wellbeing. So I know that we text and we chat and we talk all the time, about how are you doing and
because we're friends and I'm curious what you all have been experiencing lately in terms of
maintaining your well-being as we make our way through leading people and teams.
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Denise Loyd: I think for me especially having taken on a formal leadership role, it's becoming
even more clear to me this oxygen mask analogy on planes of, you have to put your oxygen
mask on first, otherwise you're not able to effectively serve others that need your help and
support. And that's very real and so many of us are in the space of achieving and striving and
many responsibilities, all these commitments. We have integrity, we want to do all the things
that we agreed to do, but don't pause to take the time to get more oxygen or refill our gas tanks
is another analogy that I use. And they're just cycles of patterns that occur in our lives, different
times of year, etcetera. So, something that I did very intentionally recently was recognizing and
as an academic at the end of the official school year for me, I get really kind of burnt out. And so
I have put some time on my calendar future to say, hey, be careful around this time. You know
this is a time of year where you get depleted so scheduled wisely in a proactive way to guard
against that. Because in the moment, we're so on the treadmill and just performing that a lot of
times I'll speak for myself, right? I forget until the crash, right, happens or it's right about to
crash. So that's something I'm trying to do intentionally to be able to show up.
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Elizabeth Luckman: I like that idea of saying you're going to feel this way. So put some time on
the calendar to create that boundary.
Kari Keating: Or some pretty cool self-awareness.
Elizabeth Luckman: Yeah.
Denise Luckman: It took a long time to figure that pattern out. I mean that's the thing about the
air that we breathe and not seeing it sometimes. So I'm happy that I saw it and I'll let you know
how the experiment goes.
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Kari Keating: Okay, we might be able to tell. [LAUGH]
Elizabeth Luckman: I think about it from the perspective of how am I showing up. And one of
the things I've learned about myself is I can put on the positivity mask in almost any situation.
And that's not healthy. I used to think that was a good thing, right? Always be positive, always
project that everything's okay, which sometimes it's not. And that doesn't mean I have to break
down, but it does mean I can be I I'm not going to be this toxic positivity person. I'm not going to
pretend that everything's okay. And so it's actually been really hard for me to have some more
challenging conversations and say, I know we're not all in a good place right now, or even just
acknowledging. I understand that we're all feeling something, whether it's pandemic-related or
the uncertainty of navigating work. And so that's something I've been really practicing and trying
to be more intentional about because it's actually easier for me to just put on the positivity suit.
And so actually taking it off and putting on a sort of authentic suit is I think part of navigating that
space. I and for me this is very much a lifelong journey of navigating this well-being peace. So I
love that we've included this because it is such an important part of being an effective leader,
showing up in the best way possible. That doesn't necessarily always mean the Energizer
Bunny happy dance. Sometimes it can be, let's sit and have a hard discussion today, let's get it
all out. Let's recognize that everybody is experiencing this stuff. And so you know, we may be
experiencing it in different ways, but we can appreciate that, that challenge that people go
through the other thing.
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Denise Loyd: For me that stands out is the positivity trap, but also the have all the answers
trap. So as leaders, we can put a lot of pressure on ourselves and have even higher
expectations. I think sometimes than those around us and be holding ourselves to these high
standards, including having the answers knowing what to do versus recognizing that a big part
of it is bringing together the team, right? The individuals that you, that you engage with, right us,
that support each other, that inform that you know, have our backs. So to me that's another trap
that I sometimes fall into, that. I think it's so important to be aware of when we're falling into that
trap. It often like shuts me down, right? Then I'm not seeking out because I feel like it's not
legitimate, right? I should know that. So, you know, avoiding that trap when I see it and it can
avoid it is so helpful and important for how I enact leadership.
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Elizabeth Luckman: I will say that the two of you are foundational to my wellbeing, whether you
realize it or not, it is it is unique to work with people and to work with people who it's not just
trust, it's like beyond trust. And it is a mutual admiration society and a mutual support society
and I'm grateful for it every day.
Kari Keating: Yeah. Connection is so important.
Previously saved note: So I'm happy that I saw it and I'll let you know how the experiment goes.
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