What is your road to leadership?

At the PLA conference in Portland, I was honored to be participate in an all-day preconference workshop called, Finding Your Leadership Pathway. Sponsored and presented by the PLA Leadership Committee, over thirty participants joined our team to craft their leadership pathway, no matter if they were a new leader or one with many years of experience under their belt.

The agenda for the day followed a five stage roadmap. Over the next five weeks I will highlight one section. Today we start at the beginning with a leadership assessment.

In order to take any trip, you must know your point of origin. The leadership assessment starts with identifying your current position, skills, and responsibilities. Knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses is also helpful. To ensure the assessment sticks, write down the responses on a real piece of paper to make it a physical process.

While those items will orient you to the here and know, there is something even deeper to consider: values. What is a value? The Google dictionary definition states amongst several things that it is: a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life.

With that in mind, what do you consider to be your five top values? List them out and see if they resonate with your life and approach to work. If they do not, you may be simply accepting the values of those around you. Instead, reexamine the list and go deeper with another round of listing values. Keep going with rounds of examination until you are satisfied with the list.

Now that you have an understanding of your starting point, next week we will provide a process to identify your leadership goal.