Recalling Your Personal Best Leadership Experience
Recalling Your Personal Bestleadership Experiencewith Leadership As
Recalling Your Personal-Best Leadership Experience with leadership, as with most things in life, experience can be the best teacher. We learn what to do by trying it ourselves or by watching others. The problem is that not all of what’s done or observed is effective or appropriate behavior. It’s important for us to base our leadership practices on the best of what people do and observe—the actions that represent our highest standards. Therefore, the Leadership Is Everyone’s Business® Workshop will begin with a discussion of the “Personal-Best Leadership Experiences” of all the participants in the program.
The purpose of this assignment is twofold:
- To help you prepare to describe one of your Personal-Best Leadership Experiences to other workshop participants.
- To begin the process of learning from your own experiences.
Please complete this assignment before the workshop and bring it with you so that we can all benefit from your success. You’ll be discussing your story with a few other participants, so it’s important to be prepared when you arrive. Completing this assignment will take forty-five to seventy-five minutes.
In this assignment, we ask you to describe a Personal-Best Leadership Experience. A “personal-best” experience is an event (or series of events) that you believe to be your individual standard of excellence. It’s your own “record-setting performance,” a time when you excelled. It’s something against which you can measure yourself to determine whether you’re performing at levels you know to be possible. It’s a time you recall as a peak performance experience.
You have been involved in many experiences in your life. For purposes of this exercise, focus your thinking only on those experiences during which you were the leader. We define “experience” as any kind of project or undertaking with a definable beginning and end, which might have lasted a few weeks, months, or years depending on the situation. When selecting your Personal-Best Leadership Experience, consider experiences that may have taken place recently or long ago—any time when you felt you performed at your very best as a leader. You could have been an official or informal leader, in a workplace or a non-work setting, such as community groups, clubs, sports teams, schools, or volunteer organizations.
Think about the context: where did your experience take place? Name the organization or setting, e.g., a company, government agency, nonprofit, or community group. When did it occur? How long did it last? Describe the nature of the project or undertaking—was it a start-up, turnaround, campaign, reform effort, or relief initiative? Clarify your specific role, the people involved, and any external or internal challenges faced. Reflect on how you felt at the beginning, during, and possibly at the end of the experience. Include any other relevant context to understand the environment fully.
Examine the results achieved, quantifying where possible and noting qualitative impacts. Who initiated the experience—yourself or someone else—and what motivated that initiation? Set out the goals and why the project was important. What were your personal hopes or dreams for the outcome? What values and beliefs guided your interactions and leadership approach?
Describe your leadership actions explicitly: what did you do to demonstrate commitment, communicate purpose, keep the team moving forward, overcome setbacks, engage others, motivate performance, and create a memorable experience? Be as specific as possible about the behaviors and strategies you employed to achieve success.
After documenting these actions, summarize the 5 to 7 leadership behaviors that most contributed to the success of your experience. Reflect on the valuable lessons learned: what morals and insights about leadership would you pass along to others? List five lessons that encapsulate what you've gained from this experience. Finally, identify the single most important piece of advice you would give to other leaders aiming to achieve extraordinary results in their organizations.