Leading Self

What does "Leading Self" mean?

A commitment to personal and professional growth through self-reflection and self-improvement.

Articles

Growing Your Career without Moving into Management
Traditional career paths often move from individual contributor roles to managerial or supervisory roles. However, it’s common for state agency employees to follow a more nontraditional career path, like making lateral moves to a new role at the same level or choosing to stay in their current role without moving to managerial or supervisory roles.

Your Career Belongs to You: Taking the Lead in Shaping Your Own Path
The most successful professionals approach their development as a shared responsibility: they take ownership while seeking support from leaders, mentors, and their broader network. Your career grows strongest when you stay in the driver’s seat.

Building Trust to Strengthen Your Leadership Brand
Trust isn’t just a soft skill; it’s a strategic advantage. For leaders, trust is the foundation of a strong leadership brand and a key driver of career growth. When trust exists, teams do better. Agencies thrive, and leaders become credible, influential and promotable.

Managing Our Own Responses to Conflict and Change
Leaders are expected to be the calm in the storm, listening with compassion and guiding with courage. When challenges or conflicts come up at work, employees look to leadership for help and support. However, it is natural for leaders to also be reacting to conflict and change in real time.

Empathy: The Leadership Advantage You Can’t Afford to Ignore
Empathy isn’t a ‘soft’ skill—it’s a leadership edge! Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings or perspectives of others. It's not only a natural emotion; it's also a skill. Leaders can improve it by being aware and taking purposeful action.

Developing Self
As leaders and public servants, we must be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and personal development to adapt to the needs of our teams and our state. Developing yourself means avoiding complacency by actively seeking out opportunities for self-improvement.

Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to express and act upon our empathy through the awareness and understanding of ourselves and others. Emotional intelligence helps us foster interpersonal relationships. It is an exceptionally nuanced topic, as everyone has a unique way of expressing themselves.

Resiliency, Adaptability, and Wellbeing
Whenever we see our friends, family, or coworkers struggling, it’s easy to assess our empathy and tell them to take a break. It’s great advice to step away, get some perspective, or ask for help.

Thinking Strategically
Strategic thinking is often described as something instinctual or unteachable. That’s not true. You can learn to think differently, and you can start with the knowledge you already have.

Overcoming Change Aversion
Imagine a strong gust of wind interrupting your sunny day. As a reflex, you lean in against the chilly air as you move forward. This is because our natural reaction to change is to resist it. This isn’t an act of protest or spite – resistance is to be expected. We attempt to find balance during a time of uncertainty.

Mitigating Burnout
Burnout is the buzzword of our pandemic and post-pandemic workplaces. For some, burnout is a new and confusing feeling. For others, burnout has been a career staple. Wherever you fall on the experience spectrum, you know burnout is something to be avoided.

Navigating Your Career Journey with Clarity and Purpose
As you progress in your career development journey, it’s important to continuously align and focus your education on the opportunities, core competencies, and experience that matter to you and your career. An Individual Development Plan (IDP) is an employee-driven tool to help you set clear, achievable goals and create a structured path to reach them.