Leaders' Playground
What if work could feel like play? Join Irene Salter PhD for stories, science and strategies that help leaders thrive, not just survive.
Leaders' Playground
3: Design Your Leadership Character Just As You'd Design a D&D Character
Ever felt pigeonholed by traditional leadership definitions? Ever looked at leaders like Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King and thought, I'm not that, so how can I consider myself a leader? In this episode, we shatter the traditional leadership template to create something from scratch that's completely genuine and authentic.
I'll walk you through five steps to craft your own unique leadership style, just as you would customize a Dungeons & Dragons character or video game avatar. It's what I do with all my one on one leadership clients and the heart of a full day leadership identity workshop. The five steps are:
- Strengths – the things we’re good at.
- Values - the core beliefs that define us.
- Passions - the things we love.
- Vision - the place we’re headed.
- Purpose - the meaning behind everything we do.
Resources:
- VIA strengths survey: https://www.viacharacter.org/
- Stuart Brown TED talk on play: https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_play_is_more_than_just_fun?language=en
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi TED talk on flow: https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness
- Simon Sinek TED talk on purpose: https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action
- Irene's “Two ways to forge your leadership compass” blog post: https://www.irenesalter.com/post/forge-your-leadership-compass
- Irene's “Making hard choices by leaning into your values” blog post: https://www.irenesalter.com/post/making-hard-choices
- Awe outing/vision walk: https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/awe_walk
For complete show notes, transcript, and free downloadable resources go to: https://www.irenesalter.com/podcast
Welcome back to the playground. As a leader, do you ever feel like people are just trying to shove you into a box or maybe a cubicle? Maybe you have big shoes to fill and they're always comparing you to your predecessor. Or maybe someone said you're visionary or authoritative and now you have to live up to those high expectations. It's as if to be a good leader these days, you have to be someone you're not. Well poo on that. In this episode, I am here to say that all you have to do as a leader is be you, just you, your strengths, your passions, your values, just as you are. Keep listening and I'll show you how. Hi, thank you for listening to the Leaders Playground, the podcast for leaders who wish their work to feel more like play. Leadership can be lonely, overwhelming and just plain crazy making. We are here to rekindle your spark. I'm Irene Salter, your host, and a PhD neuroscientist and science educator with a passion for helping people thrive, not just survive. Please click that follow button so you don't miss a single episode. Welcome back to the Leaders Playground.
Speaker 1:Today, we're going to talk about leadership style. See, I have this friend who was enrolled in a leadership training program for a government agency. He told me all about what they were doing every day for a week, that they had all these different personality tests and leadership assessments that he had been given, things like emotional intelligence and strengths finder, leadership style surveys and love languages. There are so many of these assessments out there and honestly, I think a lot of it is BS. It's as if a lot of other leadership development professionals think that if only you knew that you were high on this and low on that, that suddenly you'd have an epiphany Aha, you fit this box. Therefore, let's give you this kind of super suit to wear and here's a toolbox full of strategies and tips that fit your leadership style. Now go off and lead. I think that's really, really crazy, because suddenly you're trying to put on a suit that was never yours to wear. I mean, I've done a lot of those assessments. Clifton Strengths Finder tells me that these are my top five strengths. My love languages is words of appreciation.
Speaker 1:On the Enneagram, I'm a recovering type three who's learning to be a healthy type seven and I score 79% or higher on the big five personality traits. What does that actually tell me? Not much. Do I know how to lead better? Does it change what I might do in the future? Not a bit.
Speaker 1:The assessment approach is dry, boring, cookie cutter. It's fitting people in a box and it's full of. You should do this or you should be more like that, and I don't believe any of it. Look, I believe that there are as many types of leaders out there as there are types of human beings. We come in an infinite variety of colors, shapes and sizes. We have an infinite spread of different skills, strengths and talents. We have an infinite number of different passions and causes that call to us. Why in the world should we be limited to three different leadership styles, or even 24 or 100? I take a very different approach to leadership style development and of course, it has to do with Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 1:For those of you who don't know, dungeons and Dragons, or D&D, is a collective storytelling adventure that I discovered far too late in life. It's my favorite game in the universe. I think goodness for old dogs learning new tricks. At the beginning of a D&D campaign, the first thing you do as a player is design a character. You get a sheet of paper with all these little boxes on it and you pick all sorts of different traits and characteristics for the adventurer that you're going to play. For instance, you can pick a race. You can pick whether to be, whether to be a dwarf, an elf, a human, a half orc, a hobbit. You can even be a half cat or a half demon like creature. Then you pick what kind of class you're going to be. That could be a wizard, a fighter, a healer, a sorcerer. One of my favorites is actually a ranger, like Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. He's such an amazing fighter healer. He never gets lost and he gets an animal companion. It's the best. Then you have different strengths and skills. You pick different weapons. You pick your equipment. You design your backstory. In that backstory you have personality flaws, personality traits. You can even pick fun accessories, like you always carry a set of dice in your pocket or you have a mysterious pendant that you found on the road, or sometimes you can even have like a little pet rat that accompanies you in your pocket. Literally, you can be anyone or anything. I've played as a female Indiana Jones who thinks all artifacts belong in a museum and is an absolute expert with a bullwhip. Right now I'm playing a dwarf healer who wields a magical axe that's essentially a lightsaber. I pick this thing up and press a rune and it starts glowing and it goes vroom vroom every time I swing it around. It is so much fun.
Speaker 1:So let's bring that mindset to leadership. Imagine that this year you're going on a new quest. If you take a moment and look ahead at the next year or two for you in your organization, what are the challenges that are coming up? What problems might you have to solve? What are the adventures that lie ahead for you? And then if you could create your own leadership identity, as if you were designing a character for D&D, where might that take you? What you might say? You might think you're either a leader or you're a not Like. I'm certainly not Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Oprah Winfrey. And actually, if you happen to be one of those people, please let me be the first to say thank you for listening to my podcast. You really can't create an identity from scratch, and I'm here to tell you how you can take all of the bits and pieces of who you already are and build that into a leadership identity. That can be something that you can do, something you can live into for the next year.
Speaker 1:I built this premise into a summit for education leaders at a leadership conference. It was standing room only and what I did was I took these key components of what I do one on one with leadership coaching clients. Over the course of several months I reshaped all of that into a full day workshop and the people loved it. Take a pause here. Down in the show notes I have a leadership character sheet that you can download and print out. Or if you just want to grab a piece of paper and a pen, you can do that too. Sadly, I can't walk you through the full workshop in 15 minutes, but you can start filling in what you know as you go, and I've included lots of links so that you can go further. If you do complete your character sheet, I would absolutely love to see it. Go to ironsolidercom and contact me there. Tell me what you learned about yourself and about your leadership as you went through this process. Okay, back to the show.
Speaker 1:Here are the five parts of the character sheet that I shared with participants at the conference. Sometimes I think of these five pieces as arranged on a stick figure person At the bottom are your strengths. These are in your legs. It's the foundation of who you are and what moves you forward into action. Your strengths are what you're exceptional at. Then, near your gut, are your values. Your values are what's at the core. It's your gut feelings that are the center of your belief system and your decision making. In the middle is your heart. These are your passions. Obviously, your passions are the things that we absolutely love. At the top of your stick figure are your eyes. That's the vision. They are looking out into the distance and into the future, designing where you want to be down the road. Finally, there's your spine. That's the purpose. It's what binds your whole thing together, connecting all the parts and pieces into a cohesive whole. I'm going to take you through each one and give you a little bit of the research about why each of these components, these five, are really the core of your leadership character. They are drawn from who you already are right now.
Speaker 1:First, your strengths. As I said, strengths are what you're exceptional at. These are one of the most robust, repeatable findings in the psychology literature. That self-determination theory is the core of who leaders are. It's why it's the strengths and it's why it's at the bottom of your stick figure.
Speaker 1:When there's a focus on strengths in the workplace, all sorts of good things happen. There's enhanced feelings of competency, autonomy and relatedness. Two, you get increased intrinsic motivation, productivity and well-being. Three, there's greater resilience in the face of change and uncertainty and, of course, we know how stressful and changing and uncertain things are in the workplace right now. And ultimately, organizations that focus on strengths perform better. They have higher profits, more growth and less turnover. The cool thing about strengths is that your strengths aren't fixed. You grow and expand your strengths over time.
Speaker 1:In fact, trauma is one of the greatest teachers. There's been a lot of talk about post-traumatic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, but the real story should be about post-traumatic growth. Those beginning to research post-traumatic growth find that that is actually far more common a response to trauma and setbacks than stress or depression. Those hard, horrible things that happen to us are often the source of our greatest strengths. So if you wanted to fill in your character sheet, I encourage you to check out VIA's strengths, and there's a link to them in the show notes. It's a free strengths assessment that takes only 15 minutes to fill out. It's extremely well researched. According to the VIA survey, my top five are hope, leadership, social intelligence, perspective and curiosity. But in addition, in that spot on the character sheet I filled in a whole other things too. These are the skills I developed over the course of my career. I'm really good at neuroscience and coaching, teaching, writing and speaking. Finally, there are hard one experiences where I have had my post-traumatic growth. It's all the things and the crap that the universe has thrown at me and how I have grown from that. For me, those skills are stress, resilience, bravery, self-compassion and mind-body medicine. So that's the strengths section.
Speaker 1:The next part are values. Values are the core beliefs and ways of being that are most important to you. It's who you are, what you care about and how you choose to live. Personally, it's a core part of your decision-making. Values are the motivational construct. It's a part of your self-schema. Neuroscience-wise, it activates certain parts of your brain like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the orbital frontal cortex and the ventral striatum. When our values are conscious in our minds, decision-making becomes easier, because each of these brain areas are super important for making decisions, and so you have your values in mind. Decision-making becomes so much easier.
Speaker 1:Organizationally, there's been a lot of research that shows that values help organizations thrive. There's a book by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras which is called Built to Last. They researched organizations that survived recessions and depressions for over 10 years. In every single case, those companies were ones who had defined their core values in those early stages and built a culture of people around them. Organizations that have core values survive. Another set of researchers compared the performance of eight successful companies with similar matched companies and they said the most visible characteristics that differentiate the companies we have described from others are their values and the fact that their values come first, even before the stock price. So for you, in order to define your values, there's a link in the show notes to a worksheet I created that walks you through the process of naming your values. It involves scanning a list of words for those that resonate most deeply with you and then grouping them into no more than two to five that define who you are at your core.
Speaker 1:My values are scientific inquiry and community building, and adventure and leadership. Next up is passions. Passions are what feels like play. It's what brings you a state of flow and it's the things that you would do even if nobody paid you and nobody asked you to. Passions light up your brain with all the good neurochemicals opioids, cannabinoids, dopamine, serotonin and vasopressin. Passions are the good stress. It sometimes comes with a sense of time slowing or a laser focus on the task at hand. You have this deep sense of knowing that I'm doing the right thing. You have a sense of control. Even when things may be out of control, you're fully present, you're clear and you're purposeful.
Speaker 1:Psychologists call this state of being flow. Flow is the state of being in the zone. It's the effortless physicality of a great basketball player dribbling a ball down the court. It's the focused concentration of a composer when a new symphony crescendos in his head and he captures all of that music on paper. When mathematicians feel like there is a problem that they just adore solving, and it's that time bending when she looks up to find that the sun is set and supper has long passed, but she doesn't mind at all because she's been absorbed in the problem. Flow is how I feel when I'm swing, dancing. The lights and the movement, the music, the crowd, my partner they all blur into the swirling moment in time. Flow is also what Alex Honnold describes in the movie Free Solo when he climbs El Capitan without ropes. He says I'm not thinking about anything when I'm climbing, which is part of the appeal.
Speaker 1:I'm focused on executing what's right in front of me that is the sense of your passion. That is when your brain lights up To fill in your character sheet. I want you to name those things that bring you into that zone, those times when you lose track of time and self, where you're challenged but completely focused and in control, and those times it feels good, you do it just for the fun of it. For me, there's two different categories. I have things that I do at work that bring me into that flow state and I have things at home. At work, I love to coach and teach, write. I love following my curiosity and I love holding space for people and creating a safe place for people to feel seen and heard and supported. At home, I love D&D, I love board games, paddle boarding, friends dancing, gardening, cooking. All of those things bring me into a flow state, and so does travel. That's the passion section.
Speaker 1:The next section is purpose. Purpose is what you are born into this world to do. It's the calling, or the why that is most meaningful to you Now at this point in the show. If you haven't watched Simon Sinek's TED Talk on Start With why, I highly encourage you to watch it. He talks about the shift that happens when, instead of focusing on what you do, you focus on why you do it.
Speaker 1:It's the difference between going to a networking event. There's one person that introduces themselves by listing every bullet point on their resume. I was the CFO at a tech company for five years and before that I taught economics at this university. On the side, I'm active in rotary Yon Versus. You go to that same networking event and there's a person who talks about their mission in life and what truly matters. My purpose is to make the internet accessible and affordable for every human on the planet, no matter how poor, no matter how remote. That's why I was a CFO and I taught economics and I volunteer at rotary.
Speaker 1:Do you see the difference? It's the difference between why people tattoo Harley-Davidson logos on their biceps but not Toyota. Harley-davidson's mission is to stand for the timeless pursuit of adventure, so that we can deliver freedom for the soul oh my gosh, is that gorgeous? Whereas Toyota's mission to attract and attain customers with high-valued products and services and make the most satisfying ownership experience in America. Yon yeah, do you see the difference? When you think about purpose? I actually like the term icky guy better than purpose. Icky guy is a Japanese term and is often defined as a reason for being alive or a life purpose. Dr Kamiya, who introduced the term in 1966, claims that icky guy is not easily understood or translated from the Japanese.
Speaker 1:Without having actually lived the experience, dr Kamiya studied patients with leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, back in those days. It was a devastating infection of the nerves and body. She saw that some individuals remained hopeful despite the horrific progression of the disease on their bodies. She described one patient who was blind but loved the stories she had learned to read in Braille. And then there was another patient who had lost her fingers but could only now truly feel the texture of the air and describe that in haiku. What was so special about those patients who continued to find hope and experience deep meaning was that they had a reason to live, they had a life purpose, they had Ikigai.
Speaker 1:So, to fill in your character sheet, there are two paths that I would encourage you to pursue. I described those in more detail in a blog post linked in the show notes. Simon Sinek's methodology follows the turning points in your life. If you think of life as this long, winding road, there's places where there might be a fork in the road and you have to choose. Do I go left or do I go right? Why are you choosing this versus the other? If you look at all of those turning points, you're going to find a pattern, and in that pattern your purpose lies there. Alternatively, there's an Ikigai method.
Speaker 1:If you imagine a Venn diagram with four overlapping circles, you'll fill one circle with your strengths, the things you're great at. The second circle, you'll put your passions, the things you love to do. The third circle, you put the things the world needs, the impacts and the contributions that are necessary in the world, the ones that you might want to make. And in that very last circle, which I honestly consider optional, you put the things where you can get paid, at the intersection of those circles. That's where your purpose lies. My purpose is to use science to help leaders thrive, not just survive, so that together we can multiply our impact in the world. And that takes us to the last section vision. Vision is your dream of a better future, something that's hopeful and bigger than your self. It's where you want to be in five years.
Speaker 1:Now, back in the conference room at this time in my presentation, it was early afternoon, participants had eaten a big lunch, they were getting sleepy, and yet I wanted them to create a vision for their future. I wanted them to think big, to dream and get out of the box. So I broke all the unspoken rules about how to run a conference session. I took people outside the conference hall. I know the conference release will be after me soon, but look, I took people outside. Why? Well, the world's leading expert on the study of awe. His name is Dr Keltner, and he did this really cool experiment. He works at UC Berkeley and on that campus is a eucalyptus grove that goes almost 200 feet into the sky. Now some people claim that grove is the tallest stand of hardwood trees in North America, though I must say I'm skeptical of anything Berkeley claims, since I went to Stanford for undergrad and Stanford and Berkeley at rivals.
Speaker 1:Anyways, two groups of students were taken outside for a series of psychology experiments. One group looked one direction, staring into the trunks and branches of that eucalyptus grove for one minute. The other group looked the other way, standing in almost the same spot, but when they were looking the other direction they faced an ugly, tall concrete science building. Now, those students who looked into the trees, they had so many differences from the group that stood in the same spot but looked at a building. When you look into the trees, you score lower on a scale called the psychological entitlement scale, which measures how egocentric you are and how self-absorbed you are. If you look into the trees, you're less self-absorbed and you're more magnanimous. Also, when you look into the trees, those students were asked how much they thought they should be paid for being part of the study. They asked for less money. And finally, when Passerby dropped a whole bunch of pens accidentally, those people looking into the trees were far more likely to help pick up, spending far more time and picking up more pens.
Speaker 1:When you look into the trees, when you go outside into nature, your visioning opens up. There's other studies that have shown that nature makes people more creative. For instance, being in nature helps people generate more potential solutions to problems and create more innovative solutions, and that's why I broke all the rules and that's why I took people outside. I had them do a vision walk. I asked them to walk in pairs and talk about this question. Imagine that you and the person you're talking with lost touch, but five years from now, you call each other up. Things for both of you are the best they've ever been. You are thriving, you're flourishing, both at home and at work. What happened in those five years? I want you to do the same Go outside, take a walk and, when you come back, capture the vision. What is it that changed in those five years to lead you to the place where things are the best they've ever been?
Speaker 1:On my character sheet I wrote just one word, because I like my vision in the form of a single word touchstone. I wrote the word alchemist because right now, I love this idea of becoming some kind of magical chemist who remixes raw ingredients like sound or words or questions and turns them into something completely new. Other people might like something more actionable, like a smart goal or a vision board, or maybe an inspirational phrase, something that you could put on a poster in your office, maybe above a bunch of cute kittens hanging from a branch, or something captures a vision of what you see yourself doing in the next five years to make it the best five years ever. So, at the end of the day, we did all of those five pieces and what came out of it was five components of your leadership character tidally arranged on a single sheet of paper. It was a one-page blueprint for your leadership. With that character sheet, now you have the foundation for understanding leadership style. You can understand and recognize that you are truly, completely unique, that you have all the things you need for that adventure ahead.
Speaker 1:At the end of my day, we got feedback and what did the people say? Well, one participant said this really helped me reflect on my leadership style. I honestly didn't know that I had a leadership style. I thoroughly enjoyed learning that my passions and values lined up with my organization and who I am. Another person said it was more helpful and amazing than I ever anticipated, and it's funny how many people said that the walk outside was a brilliant strategy that they're going to take home and use with their teams. I highly encourage you to do that with your teams and you want people to think bigger. Take them outside to think.
Speaker 1:I actually talked with one participant after the fact because, while she had everything laid out on her piece of paper, she was still feeling stymied by it. She was the lone female leader amongst a team of six. All of the others were louder, more confident, had been there longer and were more analytical than she was, and, as a relationship person, they were data heads. What happened was she didn't know how she could fit in as a leader amongst them. So we took a look at her leadership, we looked at all of the different parts and pieces of her character sheet and what we found was that she was the balancer, the unifier, the harmonizer of every group that she belonged to, and that her purpose was about driving harmony in teams and bringing people together. And she realized, if she even looked on how that group had functioned before she arrived and after she arrived, that that leadership team was so much more cohesive and collaborative than it had been before. She couldn't figure out her leadership style because she thought she had to be like all those other leaders, like the Oprah Winfrey's or the Jeff Bezos. She wasn't. That. That's not who she was. She was the unifier. And once she realized that, she realized that her leadership style came from the character that she brought and all of those strengths and skills and passions and values that defined who she was. And if she tried to be like other leaders, it wouldn't have the same impact. Instead, if she just leaned into being the harmonizer that she could actually take that team in a completely different direction.
Speaker 1:So that's my encouragement to you Rather than try to fit yourself into a box. I want you to break the mold. Just be you. Dare, I say be authentic. If I had to boil it all down, this is how I define leadership. There's no one way to be a leader, just as there's no one way to be human. The best leaders use the best in themselves to bring out the best in others. Together, they can turn the impossible into reality. Well, that's it for now.
Speaker 1:I would love to thank Tyler Lockamy, my producer, for making this podcast possible, and a huge shout out to Robin Canfield, who designed the art and built the webpage. In the show notes you'll find a link to both their websites, along with a character sheet, blogs, videos and resources you can use to better understand your leadership style. Finally, will you please do me two favors? First, do you know a leader or friend who's surviving, not thriving? Maybe they need to learn about strengths, values or purpose. Maybe they want their work to feel more like play. If so, please text them a link to the show and secondly, click that follow button on Spotify, google, apple or wherever you get your podcasts. That will ensure that you find out about the next episode, where we literally get up and dance. Don't worry, nobody's watching. Join me next time here at the Ladies Playground.
