Your North Star: Your Antidote to Uncertainty
Let’s dive into a concept that’s vital for any leader: finding and following your personal North Star, serving as a steadfast beacon for you as Polaris did for travellers and explorers throughout history.
What is your North Star?
Your North Star in leadership represents the embodiment of your core values, mission, and vision. It’s what guides your decisions and keeps you on course towards your goals, much like how sailors use Polaris to navigate the seas. Your North Star can often be referred to as your Leadership Intention or your Leadership Purpose.
The Power of Core Values for Leadership
We’re loving reading the latest edition of The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes & Posner. They’ve been researching for decades now on how to make extraordinary things happen in organisations.
There’s so much talk all the time around organisational values and they’re important of course – provided that they’re real and not of the vanilla variety that we see so often accompanying organisational mission statements.
What’s really bowled us over is Kouzes & Posner’s research showing the vital importance of our personal values as leaders – in fact they found that leaders who are clear on their own values delivered as much as five times greater returns for their organisations than those who are unclear on their values or not operating to any particular compass.