“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.”

—Steven Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Clearly Covey is highlighting a critical factor for leaders here: the ability to make choices and to acknowledge one’s agency. Leaders have to make critical choices on a daily basis. Ones with real world implications for culture, for employees and ultimately for the bottom line. Yet CHOICE™ here also points us to a model for developing the type leader who can make far better and wiser choices.

The most recent and certainly the most compelling theory of human motivation and a ‘must-have’ tool for the highly effective leader comes from the work of Ed Deci and Richard Ryan known as Self-Determination Theory. In brief, it showed how humans are motivated when they have three key factors at play: Autonomy, relatedness & competence. All three must be involved for intrinsic motivation to be optimized. What supports an engaged and highly motivated workforce is choice/CHOICE™.

CHOICE™ is an acronym that describes the fundamental qualities of the Process Oriented Leadership™ model and offers a practical developmental framework for the key attributes of the next generation leader, those who are truly equipped to negotiate the complex demands of our current rapidly evolving and disruptive organizational and social landscapes and who can support their teams to become more connected, engaged, creative, self-motivated and high functioning.

Let’s now take a look at the elements of CHOICE™.

Communication

While we have two (if not three!) C’s in CHOICE™, I like to lead with this one as communication is at the heart of our human experience and a crucial skill for powerful leaders. Great leaders are great communicators, yet rarely do any of us get any real training in how to do so effectively. Two key attributes stand out, the first being great listening. This requires the ability to give full attention to a speaker and to listen to more than just the words. Verbal language only accounts for less than 40% of the meaning in communication. Equally, unless you’ve listened well then your responses and questions won’t have any impact. That way leads to misunderstanding, missed opportunities, disappointment and frustration. And this points to the second key skill: being able to ask engaging questions. Great leaders are able to connect with and empower others through their next level communication skills. We teach them.

Here’s a good short piece from Penn University on this.

Humility

I see this as potentially one of the key assets of a powerful and great leader. One who’s prepared to lead alongside rather than by diktat from above. A leader who is able and willing to listen & learn.

Without this, one is simply not able to receive feedback from the system and therefore is unable to respond appropriately, accurately and wisely. Growth is not possible and the system (read: company, teams and organizational culture) stagnates and rots. For a great article on this Harvard Business Review piece by Dan Cable outlines some case studies and some fascinating research on the benefits.

Ownership

Related to humility this means that one is willing to own their actions and words and take personal responsibility. If we want others to do so within the organization then that example must start at the top.

Delegation is essential of course yet who we delegate to, how well we’ve prepared them for success etc. is all on us as leaders. One lesson I always taught my teams is it’s not the mistakes, error or fails but how we learn from them and create new systems to deal with them which is important. To do so means we can’t pass the buck!

Integrity

On one level this simply means to be ethical and honest. To not lie, cheat or pass the buck as above. Leaders set the culture in their organizations and if you can’t be honest then there’s little to no chance that those under you will. Or worse, those who do have integrity will simply leave. I think this also talks about the importance of transparency. There are certainly times when information needs to be guarded, but ring-fencing everything simply creates suspicion that something dodgy is possibly going on.

Yet another meaning of integrity is that something is whole and complete, and I believe this offers another important angle to consider: A leader who is prepared to develop themselves and show up as a whole person and not just a persona. Take development courses, get a coach, a mentor and/or a therapist who will help you to become a full human being who knows themselves, their triggers and biases and is actively working on them to become more whole and complete. This article in the Journal of Leadership Studies gives great insights on the importance of integrity.

Courage and Compassion

Ok so there’s two ideas in here but they do relate to each other. Courage is the ability to act with braveness of heart. Our English word derives from the French (and earlier Latin) word for heart. So it is to be able to make the difficult but right decision yet also able to do so with empathy, humility, integrity & compassion. To not lose touch with our human-ness and the fact that we are dealing with others who also have feelings and families and lives. That we’re all capable of greatness as we are failures and mistakes.

Compassion tempers the strength. Companies and organizations are not merely their buildings, factories, ideas or bank accounts, they are primarily about people—those who work in them and those in society they serve. These facts, all too often overlooked for short term gains, come at the sacrifice of the very stakeholders who keep the wheels turning. Stanford researcher Emma Seppala has written extensively on the multiple benefits to business of cultivating compassionate leaders and internal culture.

Compassion also isn’t all soft. It sometimes needs some steel and fire in it when, as leaders, we have to make tough decisions or enforce boundaries. This also ask for courage as well as compassion so that we do so fairly and for a greater good.

Embodied

To be embodied speaks to that second form of integrity in that one is whole and not just a talking head. Cognitive science (the field which explores thinking and decision-making) tells us that the mind is an integrated process of the entire body and so engaging the full range of one’s intelligence (emotional, physical, psychological etc.) means we don’t focus on developing the traditional forms of IQ (frankly we get enough of that already!), but we bring other factors including SQ (somatic intelligence) online. On one level embodiment means simply being comfortable in one’s own skin, but more than that, it brings the critical factors of implicit intelligence forward in awareness, all of which make for more nuanced, intelligent, responsive and effective leaders. Go here for a terrific study on Embodied Leadership in the Journal Leadership.

On that last section of Embodied: a Fortune 100 VP client of mine wrote after implementing just some of these principles that,

“The results of embodied leadership are: team commitment that transcends the work itself and the organization; individuals bringing their whole self fully online every day; a world where all feel free to uncover every rock, think from a world of possibility, test and learn to grow every day…”

Before we go there is another factor which might make the acronym A CHOICE as in “to have a choice”. The A here would stand for Awareness. Rather than dig into that here, perhaps go here for what it involves as a critical leadership competency.