Posted by Claudio Santiago on 09 Fevereiro, 2021
To lead other people, you must first lead yourself. And even if your goal is just to become a better and more complete professional, the path to that inevitably passes through knowing yourself and taking responsibility for your own development and your own career.
Along with the desire for more flexible and participatory and less hierarchical management models, there is a need in companies for increasingly mature and responsible professionals, who are able to work autonomously and creatively, managing time, energy and priorities. That they are able to assume a protagonist stance, building relationships and results that go far beyond the traditional limits of their role or area.
Protagonism, by the way, is a word very present in the list of attitudes that companies expect from their employees. However, protagonism is not a starting point, nor is it the result of personal willpower alone. It is the result of a long process of discovery and personal development for self-leadership.
And the path to being able to lead yourself has some important steps. The first of these is SELF-KNOWLEDGE. Look at yourself and understand: in what environments do you prefer to work? What situations make you more productive or that take you seriously? How is your way of relating to people?
Self-knowledge also involves recognizing your strengths and aspects to develop. Far beyond the common sense, it is now known that valuing strengths is a much more effective way to leverage career and personal fulfillment than insisting on making a non-existent competence average.
Identify your talents: the things you do more naturally, happily or easily than other people; tastes or skills you have shown since childhood; attitudes or skills for which you have always been recognized at school or work. These answers will help you understand in which scenarios you can achieve your best performance and make a difference.
Also be clear about your deepest values. And here, I’m not just talking about ethical issues (like respect, justice or truth), but about what you think is important and how you believe the job should be done. The lack of alignment between your values and the values of the company you work for will impair your performance or limit your feeling of personal satisfaction when delivering results.
Self-knowledge leads to the second stage of this journey: SELF-DEVELOPMENT, taking responsibility for one's own personal development and career. This means seeking the knowledge and skills necessary to complete or leverage your potential.
For more experienced professionals or at higher hierarchical levels, who have already reached a good technical level in their careers, this step is very likely to involve the development of emotional and relational skills, such as:
Deal better with your own emotions and have more self-control and resilience.
Stay productive and be able to make decisions, even in uncertain or difficult scenarios.
Communicate effectively and build partnerships at work, not neglecting the role of relationships and the organizational climate to generate results.
It is a stage of maturity, of investing in your own improvement (taking advantage of practical opportunities that) and, of your own free will, developing new habits or stop doing things that compromise your growth and your career.
Only then is it possible to advance to the third stage, acting with more AUTONOMY AND PROTAGONISM.
Direct fruit of self-knowledge, autonomy means being able to recognize one's emotions and behavior patterns and respond more consciously to new situations, without falling on autopilot.
Protagonism also means making more conscious personal choices, not being carried away by circumstances and demonstrating personal responsibility to achieve the desired results. Without putting yourself in the role of victim, without looking for culprits or justifications and using your talents to have a more purposeful performance.
Source: http://beehavior.com.br/autolideranca-protagonismo/