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Welcome to Episode 139 of the Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. And before we get into today's episode, I want to remind you that the Family Systems Book study using my book, If you met my family, you'd understand a Family Systems Primer starts three weeks from tomorrow. That is Tuesday, September 28 at 07:00 p.m Eastern Daylight Time. It will run for twelve weeks every Tuesday night, and it is an opportunity to go through my book with a group of people who are learning how to self differentiate and become non-anxious leaders.

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The book study is free. You don't even need to buy the book because you can listen to audio recordings of each of the chapters, so there is no reason not to sign up. Go to the show notes and you can find a link to join the course. Now without further Ado, here is Episode 139, Authentic Leadership and Self Differentiation. Today's episode is based on an article from the Harvard Business Review entitled Discovering Your Authentic Leadership by Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew N. Mcclain, and Diana Mayor.

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George is a Harvard Business School Professor and former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and he and his colleagues interviewed 125 business leaders from different racial, religious, national, and socio economic background to understand how leaders become and remain authentic. What they found is that leaders are not born, but they are developed through their own efforts of personal growth and development. They identified seven characteristics that contribute to the development of an authentic leader, and I'm going to break these down in family systems terms. The first of those characteristics is purpose, they write, "Analyzing 3,000 pages of transcripts, our teams was startled to see that these people did not identify any universal characteristics, traits, skills, or styles that led to their success. Rather, their leadership emerged from their life stories. Consciously and subconsciously. They were constantly testing themselves through real world experiences and reframing their life stories to understand who they were. At their core. In doing so, they discovered the purpose of their leadership and learn that being authentic made them more effective."

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This is the essence of leadership through self differentiation. Remember that self differentiation is the ability to maintain one's goals and values in the midst of surrounding togetherness pressure and your goals and values help to determine your purpose.

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So knowing who you are, what you are about, and what your purpose is in terms of the impact you want to make will enable you to be more authentic as a leader and Consequently more effective. One thing is clear is that we have control over the stories that we tell ourselves when we start to see ourselves in our lives as a narrative, it enables us to help better define our goals and values and think about our purpose here on Earth. This is about knowing who we are, what we believe and connecting it to something bigger than ourselves and my own Christian faith.

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This is always connected to what I believe. God's purpose for me is to make a difference in the world. The important thing about purpose is that when it's based on our goals and values, it enables us to understand our convictions and the deeper our convictions, the easier it is to remain self differentiated in the midst of surrounding togetherness pressure. The second characteristics that I believe the authors have identified is resilience. They don't specifically mention this, but they write "While the life stories of authentic leaders cover the full spectrum of experiences, including the positive impacts of parents, athletic, coaches, teachers, and mentors, many leaders reported that their motivation came from a difficult experience in their lives.

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They describe the transformative effects of the loss of a job, personal illness, the untimely death of close friend or relative, and feelings of being excluded, discriminated against and rejected by peers rather than seeing themselves as victims. Though authentic leaders use these formative experiences to give meaning to their lives, they reframe these events to rise above their challenges and to discover their passion to lead." This is about taking responsibility for self so that one can face challenges without turning them into problems. That's how you build resilience.

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As I was reflecting on this idea of resilience, I realized that a business failure that I experienced in the 1980's has played an important part of my narrative. When my wife and I were fresh out of College, we went to Florida to start a business in the solar industry with my brother. It was 1983, and it was way ahead of its time. Over the next three years, we built the business to about $3 million in annual sales and 20 employees. However, the entire solar industry was subsidized by a 40% federal tax credit, which expired at the end of 1985.

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Despite the fact that the oil industry was receiving over $4 billion in subsidies, the Reagan administration was not interested in continuing the tax credit, which would have amounted to no more than 200 million a year to subsidize renewable energy development. As you might imagine, solar at that time was not cost effective and could not survive without the energy credits. So early in 1986, we had to shut down the business, and I ended up with a significant amount of personal debt related to guaranteeing loans for the business.

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We had the option to file for personal bankruptcy, but we elected not to do so. This caused financial hardship for many years, but I also don't regret the decision. I think it made us stronger and more resilient, and it became a part of who I was as a person and a leader, it became a learning experience that I told myself showed that I could bounce back from an extremely difficult situation. As I look back, this is all about taking responsibility for self and understanding the difference between a challenge and a problem.

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The third characteristic of an authentic leader is self-awareness. The author's write, "Often their drive enables them to be professionally successful for a while, but they are unable to sustain that success. As they age, they may find something is missing in their lives and they realize they are holding back from being the person they want to be. Knowing their authentic selves requires the courage and honesty to open up an example and their experiences as they do so, leaders become more humane and willing to be vulnerable.

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When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate School Business Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous. Self-awareness, the values that form the basis for authentic leadership are derived from your beliefs and convictions, but you will not know what your true values are until they are tested under pressure." There's a lot in that statement, but if you followed my work, you know that I believe self-awareness is an essential quality of growing as a self differentiated leader.

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Without it, we are unable to self-regulate. We aren't able to think clearly about our goals, values, and purpose, and we are more likely to succumb to the anxiety around us. One of the most important aspects of this is being able to reflect on difficult interactions with others and think about how we would like to improve. To me, this is part of what it means to be tested under pressure. The fact is, most of us only self differentiate about a third of the time. That means we missed the other two thirds of the opportunities, and when we think about it, when we reflect on it, we can think about what we could have done differently and practice so we can do it better next time.

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Doing this without selfawareness is impossible. As the author's note, selfawareness and vulnerability go hand in hand. I believe it's impossible to be self aware without the willingness to be vulnerable and without vulnerability. We are unable to take stands with others and to take appropriate risks. Being vulnerable and self aware means that we are honest with ourselves, and we might say this might not work, but we are willing to go ahead anyway because we know that it's the right path, because we know that leaning into challenge may mean that we are not successful, but we will learn and we will grow.

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I believe this is the path to authenticity and to effectiveness as a non-anxious leader. The fourth characteristic of an authentic leader is the ability to balance your extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. We know that extrinsic motivations come externally. They come from outside of ourselves. It's the wanting to please others or to gain things that come from outside of ourselves. Whereas intrinsic motivations come from the drive within us, from our goals and values and purpose. Part of the reason that I wanted to start a solar business was I wanted to be a millionaire.

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By the time I was 30, this was really an extrinsic motivation. It was a desire to get rich. But another part of my desire, my motivation was to make a difference in the world. And I think that was the thing that enabled me to continue even when things got difficult. Because I relied on intrinsic motivation. There is nothing wrong with having some extrinsic motivation, but if we have too much, then we are going to wilt under pressure. We're not going to be able to stick to our goals and our values and our purpose in those times when we are tested.

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This is entirely consistent with the idea of leadership through self differentiation. When we are driven by our goals and values, we are driven by intrinsic motivation. Surrounding togetherness pressure is always about extrinsic motivation. It's about the desire to please others or to conform and remain connected. It's about the fear of being disconnected or not. Fitting in. The bottom line is developing your intrinsic motivation is developing as a self differentiated leader. The fifth characteristic of an authentic leader is building your support team. Non anxious leaders understand that they are part of multiple systems.

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There is a family of origin, there's a congregation, there are work systems. Self-differentiated leaders are not independent. They are interdependent. They understand that the most important thing they can do is to be a self while remaining connected to others. One important byproduct of this is that one rarely feels alone. Taking responsibility for self doesn't mean going it alone and vulnerability, as mentioned previously, enables us to ask for help when we need it and not see it as a sign of weakness. The self-differentiated leader is not afraid of this.

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The sixth characteristic of an authentic leader is integrating your life by staying grounded. The authors write "Integrating their lives is one of the greatest challenges leaders face to lead a balanced life. You need to bring together all of its constituent elements work, family, community, and friends so that you can be the same person in each environment." And of course, I would say also, as a Christian leader, my faith is an important component of all of this. Integrity is the ability to act consistently with one's own goals and values.

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Self differentiation enables you to do this consistently, regardless of the surrounding togetherness pressure that you might encounter in the systems in which you function. This is what the authors mean when they say they are better able to be the same person regardless of context. Stephen Covey talks about integrity in the moment of choice, and I believe there is that moment of choice and any situation, especially in the anxious ones, when we either choose how we're going to act because we are able to self regulate, reflect, be self aware and intentional about our response, or when we just react automatically.

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That latter reactivity seldom enables us to act with integrity. It takes the ability to create a pause and to be intentional in that moment of choice. This is what it means to integrate your life by staying grounded by staying grounded in your goals and values, staying grounded in the relationships that you have that are healthy and enable you to connect in healthy ways. And maybe most importantly, when we stay grounded in our faith and our relationship with God, it enables that to inform our goals and values so that we can be intentional about acting consistently in the moment of choice.

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A red flag is when we feel like we can't be ourselves in a particular situation that is that surrounding togetherness, pressure, that pressure to conform in whatever system it is, and being self differentiated in those situations enables us to grow in our integrity. The 7th and final characteristic is empowering people to lead, not anxious leaders know that the only way to make a difference is to empower others to lead. This requires the ability to trust other people to be their best selves. When you focus on defining yourself while letting others be their best selves, you unleash their potential to do their best work.

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This is hard to do, but it's important to understand that by micromanaging others, you will get pushed back and people won't be able to do their best work. They will focus on their own resentment for you trying to define them by micromanaging. Your primary role as a leader is to provide vision and purpose to help people make decisions that are consistent with that vision and purpose. Even when you are not around. This enables them to grow in their own capacity to make decisions and their own capacity to lead to me.

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The big takeaway with authentic leadership is the idea that you are learning to be a self. You are learning to be yourself in the healthy sense of the word. This doesn't mean you're selfish. This doesn't mean you are independent of others. By contrast, it means that you know who you are and what you believe and you're able to express that in a healthy way. You're able to show what you believe and to lead others by casting vision and defining purpose and giving people the motivation to lean into the future and lean into challenges.

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What I have found is that when non-anxious leaders lead through self-differentiation, this does bring out the best in others. It enables others to think about how they might grow and they might become their best selves. This is what non-anxious leaders do, and this is how they make a difference. That's it for episode 139, you can find the link to the family Systems Book Study in the Show notes go to thenonanxiousleader.com/139 and you can sign up for free until next time.

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Thanks and goodbye.