Measuring Self-leadership - The Future of Work

Self-leadership (a.k.a Personal Mastery) is the answer to how we develop ourselves to survive and thrive in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world. Developing self-leadership enables you to become the ‘Chief’, ‘Captain’, or CEO of your own life and career. Self-leadership is also foundational to the success of organizations.

The Future of Work

Research by the McKinsey Global Institute has looked at the kind of jobs that will be lost, as well as those that will be created, as automation, AI, and robotics take hold. And it has inferred the type of high-level skills that will become increasingly important as a result.

The research identified 56 Deltas ( a mix of skills and attitudes) across 13 skill groups and four categories. Digital fluency is not a surprise, but did you realize how important self-leadership is to the future of work?

Defining Self-leadership

With the importance of self-leadership, we need to define and measure it.

Self-leadership is the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling, and actions toward your objective/s (Bryant and Kazan 2012).

From this definition, we find that self-leadership is dependent on context and 3-core competencies, self-awareness, self-learning, and self-regulation. 

Self-awareness is the tendency for an individual to focus on and reflect on their own psychological processes and inner experiences as well as their relationships to others. 

Self-learning is the process by which individuals take the initiative,  in diagnosing their learning needs, goals, resources, and outcomes.

Self-regulation is the process of modulating attention, emotion, and behavior to a given situation/stimulus, for the purpose of pursuing a goal.

Measuring Self-leadership with Situational Judgment

As self-leadership behaviors are contextual, the best way to measure them is with a Situational Judgment Test (SJT). Andrew Bryant M.D. of Self Leadership International, with the support of the OPRA Psychology Group, has developed the World's first Self-leadership SJT.

SJTs capture a test taker’s contextualized responses to samples of job situations. Participants are provided with video scenarios that portray situations that individuals might face at work. Each scenario is followed by a series of items that represent ways in which you could respond to the situation. Participants are then asked to evaluate these potential responses and arrange each response based on what they would most prefer and least prefer to do. Their responses are then used to make predictions about their future performance.

The report (section sample shown above)is insightful, however, the Self-leadership SJT is best de-briefed with a qualified coach.

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