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Heart Centered Leadership Principal #5: Know the Impact of Your Words and Actions
image: flickr
We often equate the role of a leader in an organization to that of a fish in a fishbowl. The leader, swims around minding their own business and doing what they need to do. Meanwhile, the rest of the world views them through the glass.
Indeed, as a leader in the proverbial fishbowl, your actions are magnified or possibly blown out of proportion. Your associates rarely see things from your perspective. In our book Heart Centered Leadership: An Invitation to Lead From the Inside Out we discuss one of the key principles, “Know Your Impact”, which is the ability to see things from the perspective of your employees. Every day, leaders are subject to the “fishbowl effect” – which is a very challenging position to be in.
The heart centered leader doesn’t stay in the bowl. Instead, he or she gets out a lot, mingles in the aquarium, studies and acts on the situations which develop daily. Ultimately, “knowing your impact” has to do with your willingness to put your power needs aside for the sake of having genuine influence on others. When you are caught up in having things your way – when you feel that you can’t let go – it is probably a signal that you do not understand the impact that your actions have on those around you.
Believe it or not, Winnie-the-Pooh sums up this Heart-Centered Principle quite nicely:
Sometimes, when you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside your head is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
Leaders must make a fundamental decision to get out of the fishbowl, act in accord with deeply held values, practice what they preach and have the foresight to think through the consequences of their actions.
Are you in the bowl or out?