Stacy L. Fode, partner at Brown Law Group and others share how to take a mult-faceted (or PolyD) approach to successfully manage your career and family challenges when nearing the top .   How to Thwart a Midlife Derailment.

Year-end is when I suggest clients take a few moments to review their personal leadership over the past 12 months. Time-off over the holidays offers most of you quiet moments to reflect on how good a job you did getting people to follow you.  And from those insights you can make insightful choices about how to be even more effective in 2012.

When assessing how you did in 2011, I don’t mean use 360° reviews or your performance review.  Those measures are generally about competency-based leadership.  Competency leadership models work for assessing what you’re doing.  But it does little to help you assess who you’re being.  Exceptional leadership is not about what you do, it’s about who you are.

For me, it’s pretty easy to assess if someone is competent or incompetent. That’s all about managing tasks.  Management does not always require leadership.

Management is about competency–your strengths.

Leadership is when strengths are converted to power.

Yes, there it is, that dirty word most of us want to avoid using when talking about leadership — the word power.

But isn’t that really what it all comes down to, that leaders have power?  The power to get people to follow them, the power to instill trust that their team will perform consistently over time?

Below are the questions I suggest to my clients for their reflection about leadership.  I strongly encourage writing down the answers to the questions as it gets more parts of your brain engaged and can provide a blueprint for your development in 2012.

1. Follow the Leader.  Why did people follow you this year?  The dimensions of PolyD Leadership can help you focus on specific areas if you get stuck on this question.  Be sure to look at the seen as well as the unseen aspects of power you’ve been given and power you exert.
2. “What Is It You Do?”  What’s the story you’re telling people you run into at holiday parties or family gatherings when they ask, “How are things at work?”  Did you reflect what you’re accomplishing?  How do you want to refine or clarify who you’re being when you tell people what it is you do at work?  How can your responses reflect more about how you handle disruption and transition (who you are being) and less about the tasks you perform (what you do)?
3. Strength versus Power.  How willing are you to start using the dirty-little-word of leadership?  What differences do you see between the leadership models of the past and what it’s going to take to lead in the future?  If the competency based model works, where are the dynamic leaders that use it?