Finding Your True North,
A Personal Guide
Excerpts from True North:
Using this Personal Guide
This guide offers you a series of exercises that will enable you to go deeper into your life story, discover your passions, and develop into an authentic leader. It starts with an exploration of your life story and its relationship to your leadership. Then you will examine the leadership experiences thus far in your life, as well as your challenges and disappointments. You will have the opportunity to explore ways that you might get pulled off course of your True North.
After that, you will be ready to delve more deeply into the greatest crucible of your life and to understand and frame your experiences at a deeper level. This understanding can enable you to make the transformation from an “I” leader to a “We” leader.
Next you will go to work on the five key elements of your personal development as a leader: self-awareness, including feedback exercises, your values and principles, understanding your motivations, building your support team, and leading an integrated life.
In the final section, you will “author your leadership,” exploring your leadership purpose, understanding how you can be an empowering leader, and examining ways to optimize your leadership effectiveness.
After completing this work, you are ready to create your Personal Leadership Development Plan (PLDP). This is a dynamic document that you can return to in future years, assess your progress, update your plan based on experiences since it was created, and prepare for the next phase of your leadership journey.
Should I Work with Others While Using this Guide?
Your responses to the exercises and your notes in this Personal Guide are your confidential work. However, we do encourage you to share them with others, including your trusted mentors, coaches, support team, and leadership discussion group. This feedback will be invaluable to you in developing your Personal Leadership Development Plan.
As you share yourself, your story, and your answers with others close to you, take the risk of revealing your vulnerabilities. You will find sharing with others in this way is a very liberating experience. By being open with others, they in turn will feel safe in being open with you, and deeper bonds will be formed. There are several ways you can use this guide:
1. As an individual, you can do the exercises on your own and prepare your PLDP.
2. You can work through this Personal Guide as a group with friends or even new acquaintances, as each of you completes the exercises individually, discusses their results openly with the other members of the group, and solicits their feedback. Then it can be helpful to go back to the exercises and update them, based on the feedback.
Your group can be led by a professional facilitator, who guides your discussion and keeps the group on track. Or you can create a “peer-facilitated group,” in which leadership of the group rotates each session to a different group member. We have used this latter approach very successfully with six-person Leadership Discussion Groups(LDG) in my “Authentic Leadership Development” classes at Harvard Business School. (See Appendix 2 for suggestions of how to “Form a Leadership Discussion Group.”)
3. To enhance your work on your leadership, you can use this Guide under the guidance of a coach or mentor. Your coach or mentor can work with you on each of the exercises, give you valuable feedback, and encourage you to explore yourself and your story more deeply. (See Appendix 3 for a suggested “Program for Coaching or Mentoring.)
4. You can use this Personal Guide with your team at work. It will enable individuals on the team to discover their authentic leadership and help the team function more effectively because they understand each other better through sharing their stories. As team leader, you can guide your team through the process, or you can use a professional team-building consultant and facilitator. (See Appendix 4 for a suggested “Program for Facilitators.”)
5. You can use this guide along with True North as the basis for a course on leadership development, either within an academic setting or within an organization. It has the flexibility to be used with leaders at all stages in their careers, from young leaders, including college and graduate students, mid-career leaders, leaders at the top of their organizations, and finally to leaders embarking on the third phase of their leadership journeys after they have completed their principle leadership roles.
In the case of a larger group, you will need a professor, teacher, or leadership development professional to structure the material and lead the group. Such a course should include the cases listed at the conclusion of each chapter that were specifically developed for use in leadership development courses. In addition, it is highly recommended that your group be broken into smaller Leadership Discussion Groups for discussion of more personal matters. (Appendix 5 suggests a “Syllabus for a Course in Authentic Leadership Development.”)
At the end of this Personal Guide you will find specific suggestions for team members, team leaders, educators, and coaches to use in making this guide most effective with the people you are helping discover their authentic leadership.
A Final Word to Users of this Personal Guide
As you embark on discovering your authentic leadership by moving into the heart of this Personal Guide, let me offer my personal welcome to you in your desire to become an authentic leader and to follow your True North. I encourage you to be completely open and transparent as you look inside yourself and answer the very challenging and difficult questions posed in the exercises. Have the courage to explore deeply your life story to understand who you are as a human being, where you fit in this world, how you can use your leadership to impact the world in a positive way, and how you can leave a lasting legacy.
I am excited about the possibilities that you and thousands of leaders like you have to transform organizations and institutions in business, non-profits, governments, education, and religion, as you bring authenticity to the workplace and encourage others to lead in the same way.
Your dedication to becoming an authentic leader will indeed make this world a better and richer place for all of us to live in.
Bill George
