8. Personal and Professional Development

Leadership is a servant role. You might think that means your focus is exclusively on your people. Sure enough, you will be focused very much on them, but you must not forget your own personal and professional needs and aspirations.

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If you don’t look after yourself, you can’t look after anyone else. Worse, your people will hear you telling them to take care of themselves while observing that you’re not practicing what you preach. There’s no integrity in that, and it will undermine their respect for you and their trust in you.

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Pursuing your own personal development allows you to continue to learn more, and yet more, about yourself. That’s not a purely selfish endeavour, because what you learn will allow you to build your self-confidence, help you to show up ever more authentically, and enhances the quality of your relationships including with those who follow you. It allows you to become an inspirational figure whom your followers respect and want to emulate, which in turn encourages them to become better versions of themselves.

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Pursuit of professional development is a lifelong endeavour. No matter how much you know, or how skilful you are, there is always more that you can learn. You owe it to yourself to keep learning, because when you stop learning, you’re dead! Or you may as well be.

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The course of your professional career will be heavily influenced by the professional development that you have undergone, and are still undergoing when opportunities to move onward and upward arise. And arise they will, as long as you keep an eye open for them and are prepared to exploit them. You must never allow yourself to remain in a role beyond the point at which it has ceased to challenge you. When it becomes boring, mundane and automatic, it's time to move on, no matter how much you may have liked the role.

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An important maxim of leadership is to know when it’s time to quit, and to quit when it’s time. When you reach your use-by date, don’t hang about like a bad smell. Move onward and upward, and don’t forget that as an inspirational leader you will have encouraged at least one of your people to be ready to step up into your role when you depart. Don’t stand in their way.

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An essential part of your personal and professional development will be to work with a trusted mentor. This will be someone who has walked the path that you’re on, or one very similar to it, and who is a little further down that path than you are now. Your mentor will encourage you to think critically, will hold you to account for doing what you say you’ll do, will give you frank and fearless feedback, and will encourage you when you’re feeling lost or alone. Seriously, don’t neglect this. Your life might depend on it!

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While we’re on the subject of mentorship, part of your role as a servant leader will be to mentor your people. Don’t neglect that aspect of your role. As a mentor, you will learn almost as much as your mentees do, and that is a vital part of your own personal and professional development.