PART TWO
To Thine Own Self Be True
L
eaders come to their positions with a great many skills, attitudes,
values, experiences, and educational backgrounds. Highly effective
leaders have in common a set of specific leadership competencies, which
we will explore in this next section. We chose the title To Thine Own Self
Be Truebecause the activities focus on the development of the individual
as leader.
This section begins with three assessments. The first, Organizational
Leadership,assesses a leader’s skills in six dimensions relative to his or her
level in the organizational hierarchy. The second, The Leadership Chal-
lenge,provides an overview of an outstanding model of leadership com-
petencies developed by Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes. The third uses a
card-sort activity so that participants can learn the difference between
management skills and leadership skills.
The next set of activities in this section can help leaders recognize the
importance of maintaining a sense of adventure in their work and build-
ing a trusting relationship with the individuals they guide. All leaders
need to explore how they respond to change so they will be able to help
their own followers handle change. Before you can do that, however, you
need to clarify your own values because values are the basis of ethical de-
cisions. The activity A Metaphor for Changewill help you do that. The ex-
ercise that comes next will help you solve ethical dilemmas using a step-
by-step process.
Three activities address the subject of power. In the first, leaders com-
plete a handout that helps identify their personal style of power. This is
followed by a fun activity using a courtroom scenario that puts this knowl-
edge into practice. An affirmation activity completes this trilogy on power.77