The Discover Your True North Fieldbook. Bill George
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you might be a star – unreplicable – by following your passion.”
Many books offer quick fixes or seven easy steps to leadership. Unfortunately, development doesn't work that way. To realize your potential as a leader, you need a systematic plan to support your growth. That's the goal of The Discover Your True North Fieldbook: to offer a clear and detailed path to guide your development.
We encourage you to take on as many leadership experiences early in life as you can. Don't sit back and wait for them to come to you. Seek them out! After each experience, process them by returning to your development plan, make necessary changes, and reengage with a clearer sense of your True North. This is a lifelong process. Start now.
As you embark on this journey, consider these fundamental truths:
● You can discover your authentic leadership right now.
● You do not have to be born with the characteristics or traits of a leader.
● You do not have to wait for a tap on your shoulder.
● You do not have to be at the top of your organization.
● You can step up to lead at any point in your life: You're never too young – or too old.
● Leadership is a choice, not a title.
Using This Fieldbook
This fieldbook offers you a series of exercises encouraging you to delve deep into your life story, discover your passions, and develop into an authentic leader. First, you will explore your life story and its relationship to your leadership. Then, you will examine the leadership experiences you have had thus far in your life, including both challenges and disappointments. To keep you from losing your way, we'll also highlight several common patterns that might distract you from realizing your True North.
After a broad review of your life story, we'll ask you to unpack significant crucibles, those searing moments that seem to hold great meaning. By mining your life stories and exploring your crucibles, you begin to uncover unique patterns that help to define who you are, your authentic self.
Next, you will go to work on five key elements of development: self-awareness, values and principles, motivations and sweet spots, support teams, and how to lead an integrated life.
In the final section, we'll ask you to experience what it feels like to make the fundamental shift from “I” to “We,” craft a leadership purpose statement, and understand the importance of empowering others in a global context. After completing this work, you'll be ready to create your own Personal Leadership Development Plan (PLDP). This is a dynamic document that you can return to in future years to assess your progress, make any necessary updates, and use as a lifelong guide to remain oriented toward your True North.
Should I Work With Others While Using This Guide?
Your responses to the exercises and your notes in this fieldbook are personal. However, we do encourage you to share them with trusted others, including mentors, coaches, and members of your support team. Their feedback will be invaluable as you work to develop your PLDP.
As you share your personal story and insights with others, we encourage you to take some risks; experiment with being a bit more vulnerable than perhaps you might ordinarily be. We've found that sharing your story can be incredibly liberating and in fact deepen ties with those you trust.
There are several ways you might use this fieldbook:
1. As an individual, you can complete these exercises and draft your PLDP on your own.
2. You can work through this fieldbook with a group with friends or even new acquaintances. Everyone should complete the exercises individually, and then discuss the insights openly with other members of the group. Then it can be helpful to go back to the exercises and update them, based on others' feedback.
Your group can be led by a professional facilitator who guides your discussion and keeps the group on track. Or you can create a peer-facilitated group, in which leadership of the group rotates to a different member for each session. Bill pioneered this approach with six-person Leadership Development Groups (LDGs) in the Authentic Leadership Development course at Harvard Business School.
3. To enhance your learning, you can also use The Discover Your True North Fieldbook in conjunction with a personal coach or mentor. Experienced partners can help deepen your learning, provide feedback, and add an additional layer of insights and discipline to the process.
4. You can also use this fieldbook with your team at work. As team leader, you can guide your group through the process yourself or enlist a professional team-building consultant or facilitator to enhance the process.
5. You can use this guide along with the text Discover Your True North as the basis for a course on leader development, either in an academic setting or in an organization. This material is flexible enough to support leaders at all stages in their careers: young leaders, including college and graduate students; midcareer leaders; leaders at the top of their organizations; and even very experienced leaders perhaps embarking on the third phase of their journeys after having completed their principal leadership roles.
In the case of a larger group, you may need a professor, teacher, or leadership development professional to help structure the material and lead the group. Nick has spent much of his time working with organizations doing just that with great success. Many others have used this book as the backbone for college, MBA, and executive courses on leadership.
A Final Word to Users of This Fieldbook
As you embark on this journey of self-discovery, let us offer our personal welcome. We encourage you to be as open and honest as possible when completing these exercises. The more truthful and vulnerable you are, the greater the impact of this work. Have the courage to explore your life deeply, to understand who you are as a magnificent human being, to discover where you really fit in this world, how you can use your leadership to impact others in a positive way, and to leave a lasting legacy that you'll be proud of.
We have witnessed deep and lasting transformation in leaders who have taken this journey as they shaped their twenty-first century authentic organizations and institutions. Whether they were leading in business, government, education, or religion, they discovered that the journey was not only about becoming more authentic themselves, but about empowering everyone they touch to become authentic leaders as well.
Your dedication to discovering your True North will make this world a better and richer place for us all.
INTRODUCTION
WHY AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT?
Something ignited in my soul…And I went my own way, deciphering that burning fire.
Why is it important for you to become an authentic leader?
Leading in the twenty-first century is vastly different from leading in the twentieth century. People in organizations have changed dramatically – to the point where many will no longer tolerate the classic “command and control leaders” of the last century. Nor are they impressed by charismatic leaders who whose leadership is based primarily on personal ego.
Over the past 50 years, many of us worked for powerful leaders who seemed to know where they were going, only to discover later that they were leading us down destructive paths, or that they were in it mostly for themselves and were largely unconcerned with our well-being. Organizations expected us to be loyal to these leaders and wait in line for our turn to lead, if it ever came. And then we learned that our loyalty was not returned, as many lost their pensions and health care. As a consequence, we lost trust in our leaders. Similarly, many of us were dazzled by charismatic leaders who impressed everyone with their charm, yet went off the deep end when the world didn't bend to their personal whims.
People in organizations today seek authentic leaders whom they can trust, but they are not