Discover the Secrets to Authentic Leadership in “The Unlocked Leader” by le Gentil and Lambert

Dare to Free Your Own Voice, Lead with Empathy, and Shine Your Light in the World. Are you ready to unlock your true leadership potential? “The Unlocked Leader” by Hortense le Gentil and Caroline Lambert offers a groundbreaking approach to authentic, transformative leadership. This insightful book provides the key to unlocking your innate abilities and becoming the impactful leader you were meant to be.

Dive into the pages of “The Unlocked Leader” and embark on a journey of self-discovery and leadership growth. Uncover the secrets to unlocking your full potential and making a lasting difference in your organization and beyond.

Genres

Leadership, Personal Development, Business, Self-Help, Management, Psychology, Entrepreneurship, Coaching, Career Development, Organizational Behavior

“The Unlocked Leader” presents a fresh perspective on authentic leadership, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and personal growth. The authors argue that true leadership emerges from within, and that by unlocking one’s authentic self, leaders can inspire and empower others more effectively.

The book explores various aspects of leadership, including the power of vulnerability, the art of communication, and the significance of building strong relationships. It provides practical tools and exercises to help readers develop their leadership skills and overcome common challenges. Throughout the book, the authors draw on real-life examples and case studies to illustrate their points and offer actionable insights.

Review

“The Unlocked Leader” is a must-read for anyone seeking to enhance their leadership skills and make a positive impact in their organization. Hortense le Gentil and Caroline Lambert have crafted a compelling and practical guide that challenges conventional notions of leadership and offers a refreshing approach rooted in authenticity and self-awareness. The authors’ expertise shines through as they seamlessly blend theoretical concepts with real-world examples, making the book both engaging and informative.

One of the strengths of “The Unlocked Leader” lies in its emphasis on personal growth and inner work as the foundation for effective leadership. The authors provide a roadmap for readers to uncover their authentic selves, confront their fears and limiting beliefs, and develop the emotional intelligence necessary to lead with compassion and empathy. The book is filled with thought-provoking exercises and reflective prompts that encourage introspection and self-discovery.

Another highlight of the book is its focus on the importance of relationships in leadership. The authors stress the significance of building trust, fostering collaboration, and creating a positive organizational culture. They offer practical strategies for effective communication, conflict resolution, and team building, making the book a valuable resource for leaders at all levels.

While “The Unlocked Leader” covers a wide range of topics, it does so in a concise and accessible manner. The authors have a talent for distilling complex ideas into easily digestible nuggets of wisdom, making the book an enjoyable and efficient read.

Overall, “The Unlocked Leader” is a transformative book that has the potential to unlock the leadership potential within each reader. Whether you are a seasoned executive or an emerging leader, this book offers valuable insights and practical tools to help you become a more authentic, impactful, and unlocked leader. Highly recommended for anyone seeking to make a positive difference in their organization and beyond.

Recommendation

The best leaders have empathy and demonstrate that they care about their employees. Employees, in turn, strive to achieve the goals empathetic leaders set. Leadership coach Hortense le Gentil, writing with Carole Lambert, explains how run-of-the-mill “superheroes” — her tag for today’s supposedly ideal but aloof executives — can transform themselves into humane, effective leaders who demonstrate that they have their people’s best interests at heart. Le Gentil urges superhero leaders to engage in “mindshifts” that lead to “mindbuilds,” so they can eliminate the negative “mindtraps” that hold them back. (Notice the book’s index which helpfully features links to numerous related books, articles, and podcasts.)

Take-Aways

• Leaders must be empathetic.
• Your negative mindsets can become “mindtraps.”
• Mindtraps lead to unhappiness, depression, and burnout.
• Eliminate the old voices and messages that are holding you back.
• Tell yourself positive stories.
• Use “mindshifts” to destroy your mindtraps.
• Transform yourself with a “mindbuild” to eliminate mindtraps and undergo a mindshift to build a positive internal narrative.

Summary

Leaders must be empathetic.

Great leaders are not infallible superheroes, though some may act that way. Such leaders are often great at leading with their head, but may find it impossible to lead with their heart. As a result, they can’t become “human leaders” who connect with others and develop shared goals.

Leaders must demonstrate empathy and genuine concern for those they lead. Columbia University business professor Rita McGrath explains that modern business management no longer relies only on “execution and expertise.” Instead, it rests on empathy.

“Like ripples on a pond…leaders’ empathy and emotional intelligence reverberate throughout and beyond their organizations.”

Leaders who lack empathy simply can’t get the job done. Their failures eventually become glaringly apparent. As proof, consider what has happened to corporate longevity. During the 1920s, the average S&P 500 company could expect to be around for 67 years. Today, most such firms last only 15 years, primarily due to uninspired leadership. Today, 75% of employees don’t believe their organization cares about them. As a result, many workers are alarmingly disengaged.

Consider Microsoft, for example. The company was on a downward path in 2014, out of touch and failing to anticipate its customers’ new needs for mobile and cloud computing. Then Satya Nadella became CEO, made empathy the firm’s new watchword, and put its stock back on the ascent. Microsoft now uses a “model-coach-care” management strategy. The company trains its executives to be role models for the caring behavior they want their employees to practice. Managers coach their staff members to be empathetic and to make sure their people know their leaders care about them.

Nadella explains that his wife’s approach to their newborn son’s cerebral palsy – she stopped working and took the baby to every possible therapy – snapped him out of an initial phase after his son was born of asking why this had happened to him. Nadella began to shift his thinking and started to see the world from his child’s perspective. He explains, “As I figured it out, it changed me, both obviously as a parent, but also who I am today and how I approach everything.” Absorbing his son’s point of view made Nadella a more empathetic leader.

Your negative mindsets can become “mindtraps.”

To understand and connect with others, you first must understand and connect with yourself. This means you should be able to identify which of your beliefs and attitudes are impeding your personal and professional development. Consider whether your current mindset has become a negative “mindtrap.” Get to know yourself, so you can find and travel your individual path to happiness and satisfaction.

One common mindset problem is that leaders who want to advance often view others as obstacles, not as potential helpers, colleagues, or individuals with intrinsic value. This is a dangerous mindtrap. You must treat your co-workers and employees as valuable human beings and offer them mutual support if you want them to support you and your company.

“A crucial part of deciphering, filtering, and scanning our environment, one of our brain’s main big jobs, is the human ability to read other people.”

You may be a technically adept, knowledgeable, and experienced leader, but without the human dimension of connecting with others, your attributes, however impressive, won’t matter in the long run. Your perceptions and sensitivity to others can help you build empathy and a positive mindset. However, a negative mindset can blind you to others and can become a fully developed mindtrap that constrains your leadership career. To get better results, you must evaluate your current beliefs, come to understand which ideas no longer work for you, and determine what needs to change.

Mindtraps lead to unhappiness, depression, and burnout.

To assess your attitude, be alert to the symptoms of unhappiness, depression, and burnout, which signal mindtraps. As you become aware of them, take on the challenge of changing your thinking.

“What got you here won’t get you there.” (Marshal Goldsmith)

Transforming your negative attitude is the path to career advancement and personal happiness. Even if you believe your negative mindset brought you to the position you’re in today, recognize that now it’s holding you back. The time has come to travel a new, positive conceptual path. This calls for escaping these three negative thought patterns.

1. Psychological trauma – This can involve difficult feelings, including “intense fear, shame, pain, powerlessness, or grief.” These negative emotions undermine your sense of psychological safety and can overwhelm you.
2. Identity uncertainty – People with shaky identities tend to succumb to stress and focus on their weaknesses instead of their strengths.
3. Shifting roles – People whose role in life changes suddenly often think less of themselves. For example, parents whose children leave for college or whose adult kids move away may find it hard to adjust to the empty nest or the shift in their parental role, and that difficulty can affect other areas of their lives.

Eliminate the old voices and messages that are holding you back.

To escape negative ruminating, ask yourself if you’re still haunted by messages you received from other people in the past and if their negativity is ruling your thoughts. These powerful voices can live in your unconscious mental processes. The echoes that nag you may be specific to particular individuals, like former authority figures such as parents, teachers, or coaches.

The other external voices that can influence your actions are the “collective” messages associated with spiritual, communal, and social norms. The most influential internal voices are those you “feed,” so try to pay attention to and nurture only those voices that help you to think positively about yourself and others.

“We all have some cleaning up to do in our minds, getting rid of external perspectives that we still carry like training wheels, even though they are no longer true or relevant to who we’ve become.”

To become a fully developed leader, identify which mental voices draw you toward negative mindsets and actions. Shut them down. They no longer serve you. To aid in this process, ask yourself if these old viewpoints are still “true, relevant, or helpful?” If not, they aren’t making a positive contribution to your life, so find a way to shed them.

Tell yourself positive stories.

Poisonous reflections are not infallible truths; they’re stories you tell yourself.

Your brain is a complex network of around 100 billion interconnected cells. This complicated mechanism runs all of your actions and interprets the world around you so that it makes sense. Your brain creates the stories you tell yourself and others. These stories enable you to decipher the world and to react to the constant bombardment of mental stimuli.

When you understand this process, you can rewrite and change your stories into narratives that support you instead of tearing you down.

“Telling ourselves and each other stories is a biological imperative.”

The narratives you tell yourself are essential to elevating your mindset. Each second, your senses send your brain around 11 million data points. Your stories help you interpret this vast amount of information and separate it into what is important and not important. Think of your brain as a kind of decluttering expert, like best-selling author Marie Kondo. It organizes a massive onslaught of information into recognizable patterns or histories that interpret people, events, and stimuli.

Your brain instinctively tries to read other people and anticipate how they will act toward you in the future. The downside of this process is that your interpretations can be flawed, often seriously so.

People tell themselves stories to find logic in the world or to fill in the blanks. Without these narratives, you would be lost – operating blindly in a confusing maze. Your stories enable you to travel through your world effortlessly and instantaneously.

To change your life, your outcomes, and your leadership style, identify and root out your negative basic beliefs – including those encased in narratives you routinely tell yourself about yourself – and change your stories. Discover and excise harmful beliefs and narratives that leave destructive seeds in your thinking. Understand that these ruminations are mental constructs; they’re not physical or concrete, so you can change them.

After you take a long, hard look at your beliefs and the tales you share to explain them,try telling yourself positive stories to replace the mindtraps that can throw you off balance.

Use “mindshifts” to destroy your mindtraps.

To become a more authentic, fully developed person and an admirable leader who models positivity, you must defeat your negative mindtraps. To that end, use mindshifts – fresh ways of thinking – to attain a more positive attitude. Consider these mindshifting steps.

1. Embrace the understanding that your mind is flexible and can change.
2. Learn from the empathy others demonstrate or extend to you. What can you emulate?
3. Ask yourself targeted questions to uncover your negative ruminations (which are often mostly unconscious) and use the answers to create a path forward.
4. Make a conscious decision to put aside your mindtraps and their accompanying behaviors and negative internal voices.
5. Now, cut your “unconscious attachments” to your negative mindset.

This process starts by developing a deeper understanding of how your mind works. You can’t change your mind if you don’t know it.

Transform yourself with a “mindbuild” to eliminate mindtraps and undergo a mindshift to build a positive internal narrative.

Transforming yourself from a chilly, impersonal, unconnected leader to an empathetic leader is an eventful journey – a mindbuild – with the goal of establishing your persona as a “human leader.” This effort should leave you with a fresh perspective.

Organize your thinking by considering where you will be in 10 years and who you will want to be then. Ask what will bring joy and hope to your future self. Focus on the positive qualities you want to embody and make them your own. Take things slowly. Be like the web-weaving spider – construct one thread of hopeful future thinking at a time.

“How do your ideal future self’s qualities, behavior, and achievements align with who you are and what you’re doing today?”

Carrying out a new mindbuild is not a onetime effort; it’s a continual journey that includes instituting new habits. Be reflective and stay in touch with yourself. Monitor your inner voices. Each night, objectively and fearlessly question how much your thinking has progressed.

If you’d like to try an exercise that can help you see where you want to go, then draft your own ideal eulogy. Your eulogy represents how you want your colleagues, friends, and family to remember you. As you create your eulogy, you will understand more clearly how your negative attitudes are holding you back. This exercise provides the detachment you need to step away from these negative voices, view them at some mental distance, and engage in new, positive thinking.

Transitioning from mindtrap to mindshift to an active mindbuild fuels your well-being. Among other things, it will help you eliminate self-doubt as you commit to the ongoing task of learning to listen better and finding more effective ways to relate to people on a meaningful, authentic, and humane level. Accept that you don’t know everything and can learn a lot from others.

“Genuine and authentic empathy comes from within.”

Your job as a leader includes boosting your team members’ spirits and helping them focus together on the tasks at hand. This calls for emotional intelligence and ingenuity. To find your path of positivity, focus on becoming more in control of yourself. As American mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested, you must become a “true hero,” willing to move out of your comfort zone to learn new things about yourself and the world around you and to put them into action as a more deliberate, more empathetic leader.

About the Authors

Executive leadership coach Hortense le Gentil is a frequent public speaker. She also wrote Aligned: Connecting Your True Self with the Leader You’re Meant to Be with Caroline Lambert, who collaborated with Hubert Joly on The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism. Lambert has been Deputy Asia Editor and a foreign correspondent for The Economist.