A Better Approach to Leadership Development: an Interview with Leadership Expert Mike Palanski
If you’ve ever wondered why some leadership methods aren’t working for you, it might be because you’re thinking too much about managing others and not enough about managing yourself. That’s what leadership development expert Mike Palanski believed, and it led him to develop the Me1st method for leadership development. As this course launches in November, we sat down with the developer of the Me1st course to learn more about the Me1st Method.
What inspired you to create the Me1st method?
I have been actively involved in leader development for close to 15 years. Teaching, researching, coaching.That's my professional life. Over time, I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, what people need and what they don't. The inspiration for the Me1st method was twofold. One was an increasing realization that we live in such a complex world, especially in business where most of my work is done. The best way to meet that complexity is not to focus on the outward complexity, but rather to focus within. So as leaders, the best point of influence that we have over others, is actually found in managing ourselves first. So that's my tagline. While I'm a leadership researcher, I like to say leaders ought to manage more and lead less. By that I mean, manage ourselves more, lead others less. This is the idea behind the Me1st method.
What makes the Me1st method different from other leadership styles?
The Me1st method is not a leadership style. It's not like ethical leadership, or transformational leadership, or servant leadership, or authentic leadership. Those are approaches about how to lead; what leaders should be doing. The Me1st method is focused on leader development. How do leaders develop themselves and how do they create the systems that support good leadership? This is an approach to ongoing development versus how to lead in a particular situation. So it can support a particular leadership style or many leadership styles, but it's more focused on development.
What do you think is the main benefit a leader will get from implementing the Me1st method?
There are a few main benefits a leader will get from implementing the Me1st method. One, following the Me1st method, you will get results and you'll get results in a hurry. You will learn something that you didn't know before. You'll be testing things, putting them into practice, and being able to see what happens and adjusting from there. It gets results pretty quickly depending on what those results need to be. The other thing that I think is more important is it provides a framework for ongoing development. Long after the course ends, students have a methodology and approach, a model to continue to develop themselves and to help others to develop.
Why Me1st and not something else?
There is a world of leadership skills training courses out there. It's a hundred billion dollar industry and most of those are focused on developing some knowledge, a certain set of skills, or some abilities. But there are challenges that leaders face when we don't know enough, we can't skill our way through it, and we don't have the ability to meet the challenge. Knowledge skills and abilities only take us so far. They are vital, they are important, but they are not enough. So we have to go beyond that to look within and develop the capabilities of continuous improvement. And that's what really sets this course apart from most other leadership training. Training is about applying known solutions to known problems. Development is about creating the capability to provide unknown solutions to unknown problems. It's a much deeper level.
Taking the Next Step
We look forward to watching participants emerge from this course already implementing the techniques they’ve learned about and becoming more effective leaders. If you’re interested in learning more about the Me1st method and how you can make it work for you, you can check out the Personal Leadership Development: The Me1st Method Course here.