“Leadership Circles develops leaders who drive their own personal leadership, their own career and their own success at Adobe” – this was the phrase that started the amazing experience called “Leadership Circles”.

Leadership Circles offered me the opportunity to expand my perspective and think more strategically about my career and my role at Adobe. It was an exceptional experience that helped me to refresh my vision and work more intentionally so I can achieve it. I also had the privilege of meeting outstanding leaders across Adobe, engaging in an enlightening coaching experience, and participating in mindful and empathetic mastermind group sessions.

A little historical data about this program: the program was launched in 2013 only for the Sales organisation as an effort part of the Diversity and Inclusion initiative. It was a success and after 5 years it was expanded to the entire company.

Leadership Circles™ is based on the book The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership, by Joelle K. Jay, Ph.D., and is delivered by and in partnership with the Leadership Research Institute (LRI).

The program took about 1 year and included: monthly global sessions with dedicated practices, monthly mastermind sessions, monthly coaching sessions. All of them were in sync with the chapters from the book just to make sure we are reading, understanding and applying its content and learnings to have a bigger impact on our day to day professional and personal life.

If you are curios to learn more about the practices presented in the book, this article contains a summary of it, including quotes that I found insightful.

The Inner Edge: What is Personal Leadership?

“Every leader has an inner edge and an outer edge.” The inner edge represents the hidden part of the leader, like the thoughts, motivations, plans, decisions, strengths, values. The outer edge is the visible part of the leader: the words, the actions, the interactions. These two are interconnected. “The way you feel influences the way you act. Your actions affect your results. Your results determine the way you experience life”. So to be effective in your life, proffessional or personal, you need to work on both of the edges.

The metaphor behind these 2 elements in direct connection is the Möbius Strip → “a seamless circle twisted so that as you trace your finger around the loop, the inner side becomes the outer side, and the outer side turns to inner.”

Literally speaking personal leadership means putting yourself first.

“Personal leadership is the self-confident ability to crystallise your thinking and establish an exact direction for your own life, to commit yourself to moving in that direction, and then to take determined action to acquire, accomplish, or become whatever you identify as the ultimate goal in your life.”

The First Practice – Get Clarity: What Do You Want?

“In order to achieve success in your life and as a leader, you need to clarity about what you really want.”

“You don’t just need a clear vision of the future. You need to have the skill of getting clarity again and again”.

Getting clarity could be the same thing with setting a vision. Vision is a long term, inspiring future. These two are related, but not actually the same.

“Business needs leaders who can see farther into the future – not just for their organisations but also for themselves.”

How to practice getting clarity:

1. The Inner View → it is about exploring and answering questions related to your hopes, fears, concerns, needs, values. Self exploration is a process. Give it time. You don’t have to get all the answers, but it is about making sure you ask the relevant questions to understand what do you really want
2. You and Improved → how do you see yourself in the future? It is about envisioning – imagine yourself exactly where you want to be as a leader and in your life
3. The Path → “…is an organizing metaphor – a scenario that helps you order your thoughts so you get clarity where otherwise there might be darkness or confusion”.

The Second Practice – Find Focus: Where Will You Put Your Attention?

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” – Stephen Covey, First Things First

Finding focus means managing in an effective way the priorities – choose to select a few areas that you prioritise to achieve your vision – “the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way”

Why is it important to find your focus:

• You keep track of what you are trying to achieve
• You prevent dangerous oversights
• You keep pace with shifting priorities

How to practice finding focus:

The Third Practice – Take Action: What Do You Need to Do?

“What are the most effective actions I can take to move toward my vision, and how can I ensure that I take those actions now?”

The planning fuels the action and taking action is a practice. Other than managing the time you also need to manage your actions.

A powerful tool part of this practice is the CATA list → “a catalyst is an action that dramatically increases the rate at which you achieve your vision, without consuming you”.

CATA list is a chart divided into four categories:

• Catalysts → what action you would take if you could have uninterrupted quality time because you know it would have the greatest impact on your vision. Samples: “If you’re writing a speech, a catalyst might be to stand up and practice. If you’re leading a company, a catalyst might be to communicate the strategic direction. If you’re trying to lose fifty pounds, a catalyst might be to go running or give up sugar.”
• Achievements → they are the really important actions, the achievements that matter on a day-to-day basis
• Tasks → they are the actions that are time consuming like long meetings, networking. You are tempted to work on them, and you may do that, but only after the critical and important ones are done.
• Avoidance → they are the actions that take more energy than they deserve.

Other actions plan you could try

• The 30-60-90 days plan → map your actions by time
• Walk the talk → continuous changes
• Future pacing → reveres order planning
• Master task list → add all the tasks to move from A to B

Your Concrete, Measurable Result (“CMR”) is a one-sentence description of a specific business outcome you want to be able to say you have achieved. It is a very powerful tool for strategic thinking and not only…

• Your Goal is a statement of what you want to achieve.
• Your CMR is a statement of what you will have achieved.

The Fourth Practice – Tap into Your Brilliance: What’s Unique about You?

“The key to success is to fully understand how to apply your greatest talents and strengths in your everyday life”

To excel in any area, focus on your strengths (not your weaknesses). Be aware about what makes you unique, what are your distinct natural attributes, your DNA.

This practice captures the spirit of what author and former Gallup researcher Marcus Buckingham (Now, Discover Your Strengths and Go, Put Your Strengths to Work) calls “a strengths approach” to leadership. The philosophy is that we are at our best when we are aligned with our strengths.

Based on Gallup’s 40 year study of human strengths as described in Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0, “People who have the opportunity to focus on their strengths every day are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general.”

The Fifth Practice – Feel Fulfilment: What Motivates You and Make You Happy?

“Your happiness is not an achievement, it’s a choice…feeling fulfilment – the ability to connect to an internal source of vitality…Finding fulfilment is understanding what you’re striving for. The meaning. The purpose. The essence.”

To connect the dots…the what is clarity and focus, the how is tapping into your brilliance, and the why or who is finding fulfilment.

Values are an important element in finding the fulfilment. Leaving in alignment with your values, you get harmony.

The search for your values could be done in three different stages

• Mining: recall a memory of a time that was “just right”. Use that memory to identify the values that are important to you. Write down the identified values. You could repeat the process for another 2 memories.
• Defining: from the list of values identified at the previous stage, select 5 to 10 and define them – what they mean for you. Make sure you have 1-2 sentences for each value from this short list.
• Refining: now it is about understanding what are the “top” values for you. Work to prioritise them and after you have the order of them, put that list in a visible place so you could see it often and help you in your decisions, and not only.

“To maintain a consistent sense of joy and satisfaction, you need to know what fulfills you and learn to make it a part of every day.”

The Sixth Practice – Maximize Your Time: How Can You Achieve More with Less?

“Time isn’t just a supply you use up to get things done. Time is a gift you can use as you choose.”

The mindset to maximizinf your time

• Be creative → see the possibilities, look at it from a different perspective
• Be proactive → think about it like a game – you need to gain much more time
• Reward yourself → make it a “you time”

“Stress and busyness do not equal success. Goal clarity and commitment do…When you believe life is just busy. You become a VICTIM…You choose the priorities, and you choose the results.”

The 7 shortcuts:

1. Modeling → reorganise until you find the ideal schedule
2. Define your time → what types of days you need (meeting days, work days, flex days, admin days, days off)
3. Make appointments with yourself → set a meeting with a specific purpose and be there to get the job done
4. Breaking time rules → define the length of your workday by the results you want to achieve instead of the hours you are working
5. Making time rules → it is about setting boundaries (never schedule a meeting after 20:00, do not work on Sundays, never open the email before 09:00, etc)
6. Replace multitasking with “unitasking” → do only one thing at a time – this will help with concentration, calms you down and get more done in less time
7. Power down → turns off the technology, be present and focus on the things that will help you to get progress and fulfilment

The Seventh Practice – Build Your Team: Who Can Support You?

“Building your team means identifying the people in your life who are smart, experienced, insightful, perceptive, challenging, and inspirational, and the asking them to suport you in your success.”

In your journey to personal leadership three kinds of teams will support you:

• The Mastermind → 3-5 people, an inner circle with peers that are a source of inspiration, information, and collaboration. How to make a mastermind: mindmap it, arrange it, suggest it, try it out, establish it, regulate it.
• The Dream Team → a group of advisors who could help you get where you want to be as a leader like leaders you admire, leaders who have the positions you want to hold, leaders who have the skills you want to have, leaders who have achieved what you want to achieve
• The Imaginary Advisory Board → a group of people, living or otherwise, who inspire you more than anyone else. The could be historical figures, famous people in your field, your parents, characters from fiction and nonfiction, etc.

The Eight Practice – Keep Learning: What Do You Most Need to Know?

“Positive change almost always requires new learning.”

There are three ways to learn:

• Learning by chance → use any opportunity to learn whenever it shows up, but you don’t do deep dives.
• Learning by command → you learn when someone else demands it.
• Learning by choice → you define for yourself a clear learning plan based on the topics you want to explore or you get help from a mentor or a coach that guides through the process (a process called exceleration). A three steps plan to practice the independent study: assess your options, adopt a topic, activate the learning.

The Ninth Practice – See Possibilities: How Can You Invite Success to You?

“Seeing possibilities means being open to surprising opportunities…[because] sometimes success comes to us instead of us having to create it for ourselves.”

Making it happen versus letting it happen

• Making it happen is the active mode and it is about being rational, strategic, concrete, action oriented, goal driven, aimed at results.
• Letting it happen is the receptive mode and it reflects a frame of mind that is intuitive, trusting, insightful, knowing, optimistic and open to possibility.

The be successful you should have a balance of both.

The Tenth Practice – All…All at Once: How Do You Move from Excellent to Extraordinary?

“’All at once’ is a state of mind that allows you to combine different ideas and think about them at the same time.”

To practice “All at Once” you need alignment and integration.

“Alignment is 1 + 1 = 2. Integration is 1 + 1 = 11”

How to integrate:

• Vision + Focus + Action = Progress
• Brilliance + Values = Quality of Life
• Learning + Teams + Time + Possibility = Transformation

“When you take the lead in your life by practicing personal leadership, that’s exactly what you are doing. You are changing. You are improving. You are excelling. What are you going to do with that power?”

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I hope you found useful the information from this article and I also hope it will inspire you to lead well and live well. “The time is now, and the leader is you.” 🚀

“I’m not scared to be seen, I make no apologies, this is me.”

And, the proof…