Great leadership starts with self-leadership | Lars Sudmann | TEDxUCLouvain

Good afternoon, today I want to share with you my

leadership

utopia and when I was discussing this with a friend of mine he was wondering if

leadership

in utopia would we need leadership in utopia, isn't utopia finally the place at the moment where we can undo ourselves? of all these leaders and living well in freedom, I don't know, I think in a utopia there will be humans, hopefully, and if they are humans, hopefully they will continue to be social beings too and as long as there are social beings, they will also join together. and sometimes they form groups, sometimes also organizations, and when they are these organizations, then I believe Peter Drucker's words are true, only three things happen naturally in organizations, friction, confusion and poor performance, therefore, it is not necessary nothing, but everything else requires leadership, so I do.

I think that also in Utopia we should look at leadership, but the question is what kind of leadership we should look at. The hero leadership model where the shining star is the ideal person. I don't know today. I want to explore with your different types of leadership and for this I want you to do a little thought experiment to think of the best leader you have ever worked with take a couple of seconds think about that person, what they said and so on, now everyone will have experience. other people, but I dare say I don't think you have things like, well, you know, the way that person shouted at me in the morning, that was excellent, it was just brilliant, the way and I always wanted to have more, probably No.

That person will probably have done different things and I want to explore that with you now. I don't think leadership is an interesting thing and sometimes it's too glorified, but every time you become a leader and I have the opportunity to lead small and large teams. Organizations nonprofit organizations for profit every time you become a leader you have a brush with reality. Leadership is a bit like being a parent and you have all these visions and ideas of what you're going to do and then you're in the moment and then what I would call leadership. The problem formula kicks in and probably the people you thought of just a second ago have a lot of this formula.

What does that formula look like in each leader? When every one of you who has ever been in a leadership position could have faced these challenges. I think all leaders. faces the leadership problem formula and that says TLT multiplied by people multiplied by power first is TLT which to me means too little time there is just not enough time to do things and you can't get past it or someone will take care of it , no, it's you and then you need to do something and what a lot of people fall into again is what I would call the headless chicken syndrome, they run around and say I don't know, you do that, you do that, you do that, you do that and that might then not be the best leadership, then comes also people, everything that has to do with people and for me, I always remember my first official leadership position more than 10 years ago, so I would have my first subordinates direct and the first The direct board was entering the room and had everything lined up.

I had the vision of team spirit. I had the story to tell basically and that was a very assertive young gentleman who came to me and said, "loss and all's well, but I have a question for you, I actually studied the company's email policy and you know I have a motto that I live by and I always include it and I have it for the last five years. I always include it in my email signature Can I do this like Well, in this company and it was with all my stories and with all my vision. and so on, it was like what is leadership all about, so I was studying the manuals for two hours and so on, finally we said, well, let's move on to this one, but everyone who has ever led will see that it's not always about. the glorious and shiny things, but about the little things, the little discussion that we have to make, the last element is power and that is interesting, there is a very interesting study done at the University of Berkeley in 98 and they brought in random students. and they were randomly selected into groups of three and from these groups of three two of them had to do a two-hour task and one of them was randomly assigned to be the supervisor and then a social The scientific experiments had a special twist.

Within half an hour, the researchers brought cookies and, of course, it was recorded on video and then they observed what really happens there. They had some hypotheses and, sure enough, the people who were randomly assigned to be supervisors. significantly more cookies, but not only this, they actually also left significantly more breadcrumbs on the table as if I was there to judge and it was very visually measurable and shown after 30 minutes of random states in a higher state. Power kicks in, it's something within us humans, and I think it's also something we need to deal with now.

I think these are classic leadership problems that don't get solved very often, but I think in a utopia we need to address them, so how do we do it? What is the output for this? I think we need to travel back in time, actually almost eighteen thousand nine hundred years, to Rome, to a person named Marcus Aurelius. Now some of you may know Marcus Aurelius Marcus or Radius is one of the predominant figures of the Stoic school of philosophy. The Stoics almost like the Zen of the West, but Marcus Aurelius is interesting for leadership because he was running a little bit of, you know, little side businesses, and he also had a little side job.

He was moonlighting and that is why in the statue he is also seen there riding a horse, that is how he was at that time, in addition to being a philosopher, he had the parallel job of being the emperor of Rome at that time and the historian William Irvine actually called him the true beacon of illuminated leadership. He was supposed to be one of the last five good kings of Rome. Now Marcus Aurelius, what we know about him established things like this. The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your life. your thoughts, he said it, buy eggs, use your time well and be cheerful, then when you fall from the tree of life, you will fall like a ripe fruit.

Can you imagine these words being upgrades for some of the leaders like Trump etc, most likely not like that today? What did he do? We know a couple of things that carried over from this one. I think it is a sign of utopian leadership that we can immerse ourselves in. He was focusing a lot of his time on the field, what I would call

self

-leadership, leading your

self

first. before I went out and led others and I think in my leadership challenges they helped me tremendously in facing some of the challenges of the core and the leadership formula that I have shared with you, visiting founder Hawk once said if you want to lead, invest in at least 40% of your time on leading yourself first before going out to others, now how do you do it and what do I want to share with you a couple of strategies that I have tried and that have worked, etc., to really try Let's see what we can do with that field of self-leadership.

The first strategy and the first field of self-leadership are there: self-awareness when you become a leader. Actually, some of the crucial things are being self-aware, but it's becoming more and more difficult for any of you to have been a leader or been in a leadership position. If you've ever asked for it, try asking for feedback. That's not so easy. Ask like: Hello team, Hello group, do you have any comments? Very often what they find is silence, I can these old western movies with their dust balls, oh come on, some comments, you're brilliant, but it's all good and you know no, that's not good, I mean, you're signing the paycheck, basically, it's a billion, now there are some ways, of course, to learn to ask for better feedback as well.

One of the things every leader can do is check that out for themselves and one of the tools I have is what I would call character traits, check character traits, check it out. You can do that on a rainy Sunday and do the following, ask yourself, for example, who was the worst leader you've ever had and then think about what your face does to them about this. This is me reflecting on this and then looking further and then asking: what did he do? or did she, actually, to be the worst leader, did she yell or did she yell or maybe withhold information?

When I was doing this exercise, she was like that bad leader who withholds information and here comes the trick of this tool, give yourself a score. from 1 to 5 for you, how good are you, for example, at sharing or retaining information, how bad are you at this and for me that was like, oh, I'm actually not very good at this, so what is it? my plan to move on to becoming very good at this because we find the bad in others very often also resonates in ourselves, one of the key things we must do from time to time, but if you do it, you will also see the way in which You are affected by what you do the next morning.

We're fully engaged, but then like one of these paths at first, it's very sharp but then it fades away and that's why what you can do is a strategy that Marcus Aurelius did every day and that is self-reflection by taking just a couple. of minutes during the day and think about the challenges that you have achieved but also those that you may be about to have during the day Marcus radios was famous for doing that at night for me this 5 minute reflection was sometimes done at night night sometimes often morning going to panco ddr having a quick coffee and then opening my black book and asking a couple of questions one of the challenges I'm about to say how was my leadership yesterday?

What would be the leader I would like to be? do and face the challenges that I am about to face today, then ask this and put this answer in just a minute or two of those, they are actually interesting studies from the University of California, just one or two many minutes of those can help you to increase your compassion. level for others as well and maybe get over that cookie problem we talked about more easily before the two to five minute self-reflection and then we get to the last one and that's self-regulation, you know you've done your awareness.

You've done your reflection, but you'll still find the moments where you'll still find the meeting, the discussions you have where people come in who promised you that yes, I'll do everything, I'll have everything ready and they walk into the room and say, "let's go." talk about it like we talk about what the report you said was ready oh oh sorry I don't have it and all the other things that the people who challenge you think they should be on your side and you should be on the other side and so on and all these moments in which you will confront your leader when in these moments you think stop doing this do what I told you now this, of course, is not the best leadership, but how can we do better to do that self-regulation and a tool that has helped me enormously?

It's what's called reframing reframing a simple tool where you think where you have this leg coming up to her I want you to journal, you stop and ask yourself for a second or two, on a scale of one to ten, what That topic is so important. Right now, with a 10 I'm reading my life goals, so to speak, where is it if it's a 10? Well, then you better get fully involved in it, but maybe very often it's more like a 2 or 3, and so on, and that reframing takes a step back. and I will help you tremendously in reading and addressing the situation, little strategies, little things, but what I encourage you to do is think about this when you are in a leadership position, invest this time in yourself, self-awareness, self-reflection, self-regulation in self-leadership in general, before you leave. go out and lead others because so often we hear about leadership, like people want to lead others who want to do everything, why not start leading yourself first?

I think we all did this, this will lead to a leadership utopia that we can strive for and I think we can. Start everything by doing now and hopefully if everyone

starts

doing now and someone asks in 10 to 20 years, maybe now it's a utopia to ask who was the best leader they ever worked with and maybe they'll think of you. , thank you.