Leadership Development Starts With Self-Awareness

This is part 2 of a 4-part conversation on the context we need for improving leadership development.

You can’t develop as a leader if you don’t understand yourself. In this Relationships at Work episode, Dr. Rob Lion digs into the internal foundation of leadership development—mindset, identity, motivation, and the courage to seek help. With Russel Lolacher, he explores why self-awareness is non-negotiable and how leaders can stop outsourcing responsibility and start owning their growth.

🔍 You’ll learn:

• Why mindset is the foundation of leadership development
• The difference between motivation and drive
• What coaching (not outsourcing) looks like
• How identity and values shape how we lead

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: Thank you for getting to that and defining sort of where we, we need to look when it comes to leadership. I'm curious though, as I often say on the show, relationships at work, the first relationship is with yourself and. To go down the path of leadership development to really get context around that, mindset is everything. And a lot of people don't have the right mindset 'cause they're drowning.

To your point, they're too busy or they don't have a leader that leads above them. 'cause at the end of the day, leaders are employees too, but we don't seem to remember that. So where do we start when it comes to motivation and mindset to be the leader that we're intending to be.

Rob Lion: Gosh, that's really tough, right? Because if you don't have it modeled from the top and coached and brought down, how do you know that's even relevant and important, especially if you're a new leader, right? And, and we don't know what we don't know, right? And so how do we make some inroads on that?

Part of that is this desire to seek more within ourselves. That it's, it ties to mindset, but am I just going through the motions or am I actually going to be conscious and aware of who I am as a person in this organization, in this world relative to beings and things around me? So I think there's a level of consciousness or self-awareness that relates at that level that we need to be aware of first, because then it comes into it, it will lead into, well now if I'm looking at myself as similar and different than people just walking through the mall, what does that mean about my work? So I might be similar or different to people that I'm working with, but what does that really mean and why does that matter?

So I, I love your work because you're very philosophical and I love going down that path because that's a part of this is starting to unpack what's my philosophy of who I am as a being and what's my relationship to things around me. It's awesome when we, even for one of our classes where we'll introduce emotional intelligence and people will read Goldman's book or something. For some people that's it.

That's what starts to change, that shift of self-awareness. But, day one on a job, as part of your onboarding, you don't have a leader saying, Hey, we think you should start with this book, or we think you should start with this curriculum. So, and I don't, I'm not against that. I think there's some value in that because we have to plant that seed.

But once again, that's looking up and that's them having the wherewithal and insight to say this is important to us. But the other thing is that we don't have to rely on what the other leaders are saying or doing. So our practice is based entirely around partnerships with organizations.

We're not doing as many trainings and things like that. It's more of an engagement where we're working through their challenges and their obstacles and training will be integrated, but it's not a come in and leave, it's a partnership. And this is where I think we need to get our mindset at is that, look, I'm Rob.

I am an expert widget maker in this leadership position. I know this as well as anyone else if and better than most, but Russ, Russel, I need you to come in and help me with those pieces of leadership, those pieces of getting my team to be more successful, to grow commitment, to grow motivation, these things that these are outside my wheelhouse.

And so I think it's important that we have the shift in our mindset as a, at an organizational level, that these partnering with these people is key to cultivating this in our organizations because we really don't have the chops internally unless we're a really large organization.

Russel Lolacher: Doesn't that, and this is gonna sound horrible, doesn't that just outsource leadership? Like, to be honest I hear this, I've heard this from some, I think it was Scott Stratton that said this, you can't hire an actor to go to a conference and then come back and go, how many relationships did we build?

So for a leader who's good at widgets, again, we're talking productivity, not leadership, but they hire somebody or they bring somebody else in to go fill my gaps. Make... be the leader that I'm not. That doesn't build, that doesn't fix the problem of somebody in a leadership position that's not a leader.

Rob Lion: No, and I'm not proposing we outsource the leadership role. What I'm proposing is when we are self-aware enough to know that we're not doing the right things. It's about seeking assistance, right? It's like if, hey, I wanna lose another 10% body fat. I just, I need a trainer to do that, right?

To help me be focused. And that's the same type of thing, like we're personal trainers for organizational success essentially, right? And, and there's some beauty in this, but there's also a risk in this too. And I'm not saying all trainers, whether fitness trainers or organizational consultants are on their game.

Like there's a lot of rehashing the textbook and the certification tools and stuff like that, that, that don't add value to organizations. It really does call for due diligence in terms of shopping around. But my point is that at some level, some of us are architects of systems and that we can bring some structure, we can separate those words exactly as you mentioned, leadership development, personal development, self-development, and tease those out in certain pieces and help the leaders focus over here, not so over here, so that they can start to begin to build the skills and integrate this in a way that it becomes almost like a central concept to its culture. And so now when we're hiring, we're screening against these principles. When we're onboarding, the principles and concepts are integrated and it's lived throughout the organization. And we see this a lot with organizations that are very strong in brand as it relates to identity.

So what is our leadership identity or our culture identity that we espouse for this organization that we're gonna hold onto and that's gonna be the backbone of us. So that's all I'm proposing. I'm not proposing outsourcing someone's difficult conversations, although I do work with leaders... Call it the Batphone, where because they don't have the ins and outs or maybe the education or the experiences, they're like, Hey Rob, I have to put this person on a performance plan. I don't know how to have this conversation. I don't know how to structure this meeting, things like that. So I get a text, like we jump on the phone, little quick coaching.

I call to mini MBA, right? And so that we give them what they need and then they're off and running and it's like circle back and let me know how that went. And so... But I need to call someone to fix my heater in my car. You know what I mean? Like it's the same thing, like we need to turn to people that can offer us the services and assistance and perspective.

That's why coaching's become so popular, because we can't do some things ourselves.

Russel Lolacher: Do you find motivation an interesting one? It's funny because it's on a spectrum and people go, you're a leader because you're a leader, you need to have this fuel in you to be a B leader, to be a C leader. Like there is this expectation of this aspiration of this motivation to move up this jungle gym or this ladder or whatever.

But not everybody, especially generationally, has the same motivation behind them. So to go back to your point about self-awareness, I know myself, I know I'm not motivated, but I'm a leader. I'm not fitting the mold of the expectation of the organization or what a leader should be. How do we tackle that?

Rob Lion: Yeah, what you're talking about resonates more along the lines of drive to me and, and there is a difference for motivation and drive. It's, it's having open and honest conversations and candid conversations. If I'm trying to figure out who's gonna lead this team, I'm looking at a couple of my members that are internal as well as a couple outside I, at least internally, I've test driven them, right?

It's like an internship or a test driving a car. I know what they're capable of, but once again, if I don't possess the skills to have these conversations, to cultivate and to create expectations and give them targets. How do I expect them to show up at that level if they don't have that drive? And just because they have that drive, we've seen a lot of things go wrong with drive that things, you run off the rails and things like that because that drive isn't focused or directed in a manner or in the direction we want it to go.

So it, I, to me, a lot of it comes down to knowing others, knowing yourself, having good quality communication so that you could collectively set expectations, vision, goals, things like that. And for a lot of people we do some goal work with organizations and I personally am not a goal person. I'm not goal oriented in the sense of, I have all these goals I wanna accomplish and this is how I'm gonna do it, stuff like that.

But that doesn't mean my team doesn't need it. For me it's innate, it's really natural process. But it isn't for them, and they can't read my mind. And so when we're bringing people in, it's important to have these clarifying conversations to set them up for success. This is, to me, what we're ultimately talking about, right?

Is how are we setting people up for success? Whether it's a new hire with no leadership roles, or it's a new hire that is gonna be the leader of this division. What are we doing to set them up for success? And to me it comes back to that backbone of what is our identity as it relates to our culture and practice for leading people.