Hierarchy of Life Management

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Self Awareness and the Effective Leader

92 ratings

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Rice University

Self Awareness and the Effective Leader

92 ratings

Course 1 of 3 in the Specialization Leadership Development for Engineers

Part of being an effective leader is learning how to play to your strengths and overcome characteristics that don't lend to good leadership practices. During the course, you will examine your own strengths and learn ways to use them in a leadership role. Learn to manage stress and solve problems creatively. Throughout the course, you will also build a tool kit of useful techniques that you can begin using right away in your engineering career. This course is designed for engineers who are interested in and have the desire to advance into leadership and management roles. You don't need any leadership experience to do well in this course. We ask you to reflect on your personal experiences pretty often,, so some work experience will help you in that aspect, but we hope that most of what you learn here will be applicable to many areas of your life.

From the lesson

Self Awareness

An introduction to self-assessment tools that allow you to identify strengths and weaknesses and how they could impact your leadership style. This week's tool for your leadership toolkit is developing your statement of life purpose.

Observation and Objectives1:39

Hierarchy of Life Management5:40

Personality Assessments8:19

Core Self Evaluation2:16

Locus of Control5:30

Dispositional Influences1:16

Cognitive Styles4:16

Managing Oneself Discussion3:00

Meet the Instructors

David Van Kleeck
Professor in the Practice of Engineering Leadership
Rice Center for Engineering Leadership

As we progress on our journey of leadership development,

it's useful to have a roadmap to guide our endeavors.

So let's begin with the hierarchy of life skills, and in particular,

self awareness which lies at its core.

Overlaid on top of self awareness is goal setting and setting priorities and

we discussed this in some detail in our last module and

we'll come back to it later on in this specialization.

You will recall from the last module that I talked about time management.

I've taken the liberty here of substituting managing behavior for

managing time.

To re-emphasize the point, you can't manage time,

you can only manage your behavior.

Overlaid on top of these core elements is managing stress.

How you use stress or deal with stress

will have a significant impact on how effective your leadership is.

We call this the hierarchy of life-management skills.

I'm going to back and

look at each of these in much more detail beginning with self awareness.

So what is self awareness?

It is that knowledge that we possess about ourselves that is essential for

our growth.

Why is this important to leaders?

If you don't understand or have a good awareness of yourself, your attitudes,

your motivations, then it's hard to make changes and

adjustments that will improve your effectiveness.

However, it's important to realize all of us like to receive positive information,

but there is some information that we are resistant to hearing.

In order to be effective, we need both categories.

That information that is consistent with our self-image we readily accept.

However, we tend to avoid that which isn't consistent with our self-image.

We need both, and

we're going to take a little time now to examine the concept of the sensitive line.

What happens when we as individuals

receive information that isn't consistent with our self-knowledge.

We have some options.

When we reach that line there may be a tendency to respond in an emotional way.

Particularly when that information is not consistent with our own self-image.

We may feel pressure or tension.

We may respond with a stress response.

We call the negative response to receiving

information inconsistent with our self image the threat rigidity response.

This may feel like stress, tension, your heart rate may go up,

your breathing might have increase.

But what I've experienced is that those leaders that are most effective are those

that can push that sensitive line further and further out so that they are capable

of receiving information that's not consistent with their self-image.

Analyze that information and then act appropriately to validate invalidate it,

and then adjust their own leadership development plans.

So how do we develop and validate our self knowledge?

What are the tools that are out there for us?

Well, first of all we need to seek that information out,

we need to seek it from others.

Part of your assignment in this course is to ask for

supplemental feedback from others who have seen you in a leadership role.

Another way is to self-disclose and get feedback from others as you do that.

Share information about yourself.

In that vain, through this course and the remainder of our specialization together.

I will share information about myself as a basis for comparison and

also to share how I have adjusted my leadership development

to accommodate various aspects of self awareness.

The tools that are available to us

are a variety of self assessments that are in the text.

You've already received those and we will want to complete

all of those before we proceed to the other lessons in this module.

So what are the components of self-awareness that we'll be dealing with?

Let's begin with core self evaluation.

This is composed of several elements.

But it all relates to self-esteem.

It includes locus of control, self efficacy, and

others that we're going to spend much more time talking about.

What are your values?

Your values will influence your behavior, and the way you make decisions.

We'll spend some time in another module to talk about how you assess your values.

How you learn new things is going to be important to your leadership development,

so we'll spend a little bit of time talking about what is your learning style.

How do you adjust to change?

As was clear in our second module when we talked about the engineer of 2020.

Change is inevitable in the engineering profession, not only is it inevitable but

it will be rapid and increasing.

We must have a way to adjust to change and adapt.

How well do you deal with others?

How do you tune in to the emotional level of your team, or

the emotional state of others.

Your ability to do that and

adjust your behavior appropriately will be a key to your success as a leader.

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