Personal Leadership – Misplaced Control Can Cause Chaos

misplaced control in personal leadershipAll you have to do is look inside any organization and see frustrated people to know on some level they have been trying to handle misplaced control.

Missed placed control in leadership creates in followers; unhappiness, low level personal accountability and even apathy. The leader themselves are often the most frustrated as they are not getting the results they truly want nor the behaviors they had hoped for from followers.

When those who lead try to externalize control they create an isolating pattern of decision making and find themselves spending more time alone in fear based perspectives.

In lack perspectives, leaders put emphasis on trying to manage or direct possible negative outcomes – for themselves and the organization. How many leaders, do you know that spend more time making sure their own back sides are covered compared to the amount of time they spend serving their followers?

This is “I or me” perspective, is misplaced control. There is a time to have power over things, although it’s not about full-on control. It’s actually a dance between controlling and allowing.

The perfect balance of control comes in knowing which foot to put forward. For leaders this means truly understanding what it is they they can direct  successfully– internal things like their own personal leadership.

Unfortunately though, in today’s ever increasing speed of business, information and decision making and rising chaos, often a common tendency is to try to put a foot down harder in an attempt to control the externals.

As the chaos temperature rises – you can watch an increase in behaviors such as decision making without input from colleagues and followers, more attempts to overly manage
their environment, and even reinforcing beliefs about what might happen without such a tight hold on things.

Unfortunately, the intended grasp over of these externals ends up being a futile control because of several factors, the most remarkable being; they are actually causing
increased frustration in the lives of their own follower-ship. Once a leader learns to put more attention on “internal” personal leadership – they begin to have less need for
external control.

Someone who is demonstrating good internal control is spending time on their own personal leadership development. Behaviors like the pursuit of greater self awareness,
and personal mastery. They are demonstrating high self-responsibility, high level accountability and they are more than likely in a servant perspective in effect – they are
leading from the inside out. They have found there own personal leadership ease.

When leaders shift their perspective to recognizing what they criticize is actually about their own inability to be in a holistic perspective – there is opportunity to create greater ease and inspiration in organizations. The Shift from “I to We” can be a powerful one for a leader. It shifts the perspective from one of lack to one of abundance.

Imagine an environment where positive and expanding questions are asked, input is sought after and the best in people was a focus. Imagine the innovative structures for accomplishing work which could be created from a dance of allowing vs. the hardened stomp of control.

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