One of our clients is clear that her success as a leader will relate to team members who are flourishing and to how many leaders she’s creating along the way: she’s realised that in order to step up she needs to ‘pull everyone up around her’. In the last two years she’s had two promotions in quick succession, and she says it’s all about creating her own style of leadership (rather than aiming to be a clone of anyone else) – in her case a style which is about enabling people to work to their strengths. She knows what she thinks, she’s clear about her values, and she stands up for her convictions, no matter whether she’s widely supported or not, and she has a strong sense of moral integrity and of the need to do the right thing by her company. It’s not always easy to manage the tensions between individual interests in her team and organisational interests, but she’s guided by clarity on the team values. She’s a living example of authentic leadership.
