Spark: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success

by Angie Morgan

leadership isn’t about authority. It’s about building credible influence with others.

when people are placed first, they are positioned to provide the highest possible level of service. Profits are sure to follow.

Becoming a Spark is a choice, and one that begins with rethinking how you respond to the most pressing challenges you’re facing.

what captured my attention was the level of candor among the pilots. Junior officers pointed out where their bosses made mistakes, and senior officers were open to their input and even asked for additional constructive criticism. I wasn’t expecting this type of candid feedback in a rank-oriented culture.

I didn’t want to waste time fighting the Air Force culture, but I could change my response to it.

You only need one Spark to ignite a high-impact change in an organization, even if the first person to change is yourself. That may be all your company needs to achieve significant and noticeable improvement.

we define a leader as someone who influences outcomes and inspires others.

Peer leadership, as you probably know, is one of the most challenging types of leadership because your peers can and will push back without fear of repercussion. If they don’t agree with a decision you make, there is no silent protest—you’ll hear about it immediately. When you screw up, the jokes that would typically be told behind your back are told right to your face. In short, learning peer leadership skills certainly kept us on our toes, but afterward we had a clear view of our strengths and weaknesses. This training had a specific purpose: to ensure that when we got to the “real” Marine Corps to lead a platoon, we wouldn’t have to rely on our rank or position to be effective but would have learned how to lead through influence.

You’re not chosen to be a leader. You choose to lead.

any success I could experience with a team would be more significant than anything I could do by myself.

Spark qualities include being credible to others so that they trust you, holding yourself accountable to your challenges, making good decisions when you’re feeling pressure to act, expressing your confidence in clutch moments, and bringing a group of individuals together to form a full and cohesive team.

your instincts first need to be challenged before they can be trusted.

The way to stop reacting and start responding like a Spark is to invoke higher-order cognitive processes to control your actions. What does this mean when it comes to leadership development? Get inside your head and start paying attention to your reactions to challenging situations.

Cognitive flexibility is commonly described as the ability to switch your thinking in order to solve problems, which we all do really well with the non-people-related challenges we experience.

We all fall into ruts and routines with people, especially in long-standing relationships, and there are times when we don’t flex in our approach when dealing with tough situations. This can lead to roadblocks, which limit the level of leadership we provide others.

A key second step is demonstrating cognitive discipline: the ability to inhibit an instinctual or habitual reaction and substitute a more effective, less obvious response instead—a Spark response.

When you decide to become a Spark, you need to spend serious time reflecting on where you are on the leadership development continuum. What are your real strengths? What are your true weaknesses? This knowledge helps you recognize opportunities for your development.

leaders are successful when they have real awareness of their talents and can put themselves in a position to leverage them.

Johari Window,

Revisit your Johari Window!

What you know and everyone knows What you don’t know and everyone else knows What you know and no one knows What you don’t know and no one knows

SPARK ACTIONS In summary, on your Spark journey you must: Choose to lead. No one else makes you a leader. You make you a leader. Embrace the struggle within—instead of worrying about what you weren’t born with, build upon what you already have. Focus on responding, not reacting, to the people and events you encounter. Anticipate your blind spots—challenge yourself to gain a full view of your strengths and limitations. Be open to examining your beliefs about your abilities and exploring your hidden talents.

paying attention to your own thoughts, ideas, and behaviors in the workplace that either enhance or limit your influence.

through these choices you honor your future self—that person you aspire to be twenty, thirty, or forty years from now. Your tough choices will add up to a life your future self will be proud to have lived.

which key values are most important to you. This type of work is best done in a quiet place, which is often difficult to find in this day and age. But when done well, this internal work can force you to confront some hard truths in your life.

We need other Sparks around to leverage their collective intelligence and wisdom and apply it in our lives.

connect monthly for a ninety-minute call. During each call one of us is “up,” meaning it’s that member’s turn to submit her goals, progress, and challenges to the group. That person typically sends her thoughts in writing to the group prior to the call when she’s up. Then, during the group conference call, after we catch up personally, the member being featured that month reviews her report and asks the group for guidance on specific matters.

it’s when we’re busy that we’re most vulnerable to compromising our values.

Researchers have referred to this as the Morning Morality Effect: we’re better positioned to act ethically earlier in the day than later on.*

Schedule critical meetings in the morning, when you have greater energy to make tough decisions.

Leading with your own values is the gateway to leading others.

if you can count on yourself, there’s no doubt that others can count on you too.

SPARK ACTIONS To be a Spark, you’ve got to do the tough work on yourself first. Follow these steps to begin understanding and expressing your values: Find a quiet place and dedicate time to reflecting on the values that are most important to you. Identify a list of your top five most important values. Assess your support network—the people you can rely on as you develop your Spark behaviors. Work to ensure that these people stay present in your life. Understand the circumstances in which you have tended to compromise your values. Work to manage your schedule so as to avoid these situations.

there is a recipe for credibility. It’s the combination of your character and your performance level. To be a Spark, you can’t have one without the other.

if you’re working with others to achieve success, it’s important that every interaction with you is reassuring to them.

This can be demonstrated by implementing the four keys to credibility that ensure a high level of performance: Understanding and meeting the standards of others Having a very narrow “say-do gap” Communicating your intent and expectations to others Holding others accountable when they fail to meet standards These four actions are interdependent, and each can be undertaken with conscious effort. But the challenge is that they become progressively more difficult as each new action is introduced.

figure out what success would look like in all my relationships and to gain a very clear picture of what I needed to do to be a strong performer.

We naturally think that our way of performing our work is the right way because, after all, we’ve always done it that way and no one has told us anything different. But this approach leaves many opportunities to build influence on the table.

we often become so focused on the technical and tactical aspects of training when we’re learning our job that we can easily overlook the “people” aspect of our role.

uncovering these unspoken standards by paying attention to your environment and inferring what your stakeholders value.

even if meeting some of these expectations feels uncomfortable to you or they don’t quite mesh with what you want to be doing, they remain important to others.

So while you might hate filing your expense report at the end of the week, or don’t want to wear your safety goggles while touring the plant, remember that your preferences don’t matter. To be a Spark, you must not only know what’s expected of you but always perform to the level of excellence that you would demand from yourself (and others) against all the standards that have been set for you.

Sparks always ensure that they honor every commitment they make throughout the day by following through, because they know what’s at risk if they let their standards slide—their influence.

At every level of communication, the big boss’s intentions—what he or she wanted to happen—were passed along. But we were never instructed in how to achieve the result. That was on us to figure out because, unlike the commander, we were present at the point of action.

This gave us a lot of room to take initiative without losing sight of the goal.

share the “what” that needs to happen and then leave the “how” up to team members. Interestingly, when managers back off from their need to control, they’re quickly surprised by how creative and successful their teams can be without their direct involvement.

Start by considering the people problems you’re experiencing right now and how you could go about addressing them in a productive way.

a leader is someone who influences outcomes and inspires others. To inspire you have to deliver feedback that doesn’t make people cringe and shrink, but motivates them to grow.

After you find the right time and place and have specifically named the standard you’d like to address, the next step is to ask the person if he or she is open to feedback.

When you offer your feedback, focus on what you’ve observed and what impact it’s had on you.

What we’ve found is that if you care enough to offer feedback, you also need to have ideas for how the person can improve.