Self-leadership is a bit trendy but what is it really, what should it provide and how can you practice it?
Self-leadership emerged in the 1980s and is considered by one of the coins Charles Manz to be “a process by which individuals control their own behaviors, influence and guide themselves through the use of a specific selection of behavioral and cognitive strategies” .
The three parts of self-leadership
Self-leadership consists of three strategies: one for managing one’s own behaviors, one for finding natural rewards at work and one for managing thoughts. Behavioral strategies are designed to encourage positive and desirable behaviors that lead to desirable outcomes. This at the same time as the behavioral strategies should help to displace undesirable behaviors that lead away from these results. It can be about analyzing one’s own behavior, setting goals and rewarding oneself. The reward strategies are there to create the experience of competence and autonomy in order to be able to more easily increase one’s own performance. It is about finding tasks that are rewarding in themselves and adapting the work so that it becomes motivating in itself. The cognitive strategies, or thought strategies,
Criticism of the concept of self-leadership
The reader probably notices that these strategies are by no means something new. These are classic tricks from psychology. Therefore, self-leadership has been criticized precisely for not being something new. The defenders then say that this is not the point, it is rather intended as a practical framework for personal behavior change.
What should self-leadership lead to?
The theory is that self-leadership should be extra favorable in organizations that use self-governing teams. There are also hypotheses that self-leadership should promote such things as job satisfaction. For many, it is probably just a word that means that employees take their own initiatives and responsibility in a complex working life.
I actually had a weekly course on the course yard a long time ago called “Leading yourself and others” (Actually a very popular course if I may take the opportunity and brag. One comment was “The best course I have been on”) but then I thought not on any definition of self-leadership.
So far, there seems to be a lack of concrete results in scientific studies that show that the concept of self-leadership adds something to other models. But the area is exciting to follow. For example, a Swedish research team has looked at the importance of self-leadership in open office landscapes . The conclusion was that personal goals were important, which is a classic finding from psychological research.
So maybe we should settle for self-leadership bundling together some sensible psychological theories into a practical toolbox. A bit like we did with our digital tool Habitud.
Self-leadership is boosted with habitud
For those who want to work with self-leadership, we have collected hundreds of psychological training tips on habitud.se for behavioral strategies , reward strategies and thought strategies. Since all training tips are based on scientific studies from psychology, we can ignore whether self-leadership is an unnecessary concept in research or not, if you like it, we have well-founded tools for you! We have also put together three courses, one for behavioral strategies , one for reward strategies and one for thinking strategies . You can also see how I practiced self-leadership when I bathed outdoors for a year . Because it must be counted as self-leadership, right?
