Seven Facets in the Art of Leadership

Seven Facets in the Art of Leadership - November 1, 2002

Seven Facets in the Art of Leadership
A Mentoring Model
Developed by Richard Scoggins and Chiltern Oak Consulting
A Self Assessment Tool

The Seven Facets in the Art of Leadership represent years of actual experience training and developing leaders in a wide variety of situations and organizations. Leaders do not come in one variety. Instead we have worked with many different leaders, each of whom is talented in different areas, and has usually developed a style of leadership in keeping with those talents. We have found the 7 Facets outlined in our training material as ones that are essential to a broad ability to lead a variety of people in a variety of seasons borrowing from a variety of styles.

We have found that leaders are usually strong in some of the 7 Facets of Leadership and weak in others. This means that they tend to lead very well in certain situations when their natural strengths can be utilized, but often find themselves stagnating and drifting during other seasons of corporate development. Leaders will often try to compensate for their weaknesses by playing to their strengths rather than developing themselves in new areas. The result is often an unbalanced, un-integrated leader who will usually hit a glass ceiling at some point, or fail, or suffer burnout or breakdown due to the weaknesses. Often it is at these times when leaders see the need for further development.

Also, leaders often struggle in developing new leaders to augment or succeed them. Usually this is because they seek ones like themselves. Especially in the case of founding or pioneer leaders, this is usually not desirable (or even possible!), since often the organization or team will have moved into a new season. If the same leadership style is propagated, this can often hold an organization or team back from developing to its full potential. Leaders usually struggle in developing new leaders who have different strengths than them.

Our goal is that in the course of this mentoring program, you, as an already established leader, will:

gain a better understanding of your natural strengths and their corresponding weakness
recognize and learn how to develop new skills in some of the other facets
become more integrated personally and as a leader in the different challenges of leadership
develop skills which can be passed on to other emerging leaders

The Seven Facets have been designed to provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to Leadership Development. This worksheet has been developed as a tool to help mentoree's (those being trained) do a self-evaluation from which a Personal Development Plan can emerge. As the mentoree gains skills in the area of their own personal Leadership Development, they can then use this tool with others they may mentor in the future.

Assignment:

Take some time to reflect over each of the 7 Facets below.
Try to imagine where and how each of these Facets are displayed in your job.
Which Facets would you list as strengths?
Which Facets would you list as weaknesses?
We have a shorter description of these to give out to other who may help you to get a more accurate perception of yourself. (See Feedback on 7 Facets of Leadership)

From this your mentor will work with you to develop a Personal Development Plan.

For the rest of the seven facets document contact Dick Scoggins...