To activate authentic leadership, you must put yourself on the line to resolve personal issues and take the first steps towards personal mastery. When you are more present-centered and psychologically at risk, you will be an ideal medium for growth.
The key to developing mastery and leadership is a willingness to be open and to share your experiences, both good and bad. Of course, this requires that you first overcome a variety of limiting beliefs and stopping points that serve as obstacles to becoming an autonomous, emotionally connected decision-maker. This begins with a considerable amount of self-examination. Ultimately, self-examination becomes the paradigm for transformative leadership in which you can become even more powerful and effective in your own trading life and in terms of your impact on supporting others in the process as well.
As you learn how to act independently of your own blocks and fears, you can begin to see how you can lead your teams towards greater performance. To the extent that you can reveal your own vulnerability and sense of uncertainty, you will develop greater mastery and become an invaluable leader to your team.
In effect, the willingness to talk openly about your personal trading issues will enable you and your team members to get past the need to appear stronger and more confident than you really feel inside. As you expose your weaknesses and frailties, ambitions and dreams, and get past the need to maintain a facade of competence, you will become amazingly alive and empowered by the process and discover a tremendous amount of support that exists for you and others in this shared experience.
This type of communication doesn’t happen by accident, especially in the harried world of trading. A good leader will have to make communication a priority and work to establish opportunities for the team to develop communicative skills. Whether in a regular weekly consultation or within an intensive several hour consultative seminar, I encourage you to set aside a specific time to examine a variety of issues with your trading team. As you and your team openly discuss, you will rapidly get at the heart of some of the issues that keep people from being as effective as they can be as traders and leaders. Begin by addressing the following items:
* The most common psychological problems: lack of specific goals, an inability to cut losses, panic, fear of success, fear of losing, euphoria, gambling impulses, perfectionism, etc.
* Problematic trading patterns: not trading big enough, not holding long enough, holding too long, excessive caution, inflexibility, paralysis by analysis, excessive risk-taking
* Examples of trading strategy in terms of sizing, conviction level, price targets and P&L goals
* Examples of investment ideas vis-a-vis specific companies, in terms of bullish and bearish case, catalysts, risk/reward parameters, and variant perception (what was known at the time of the investment that no one else knew which gave them a trading edge)
* Examples of best and worst trades
* Summary sheets of trading statistics, if available, in terms of P&L, amount of capital being used, percentage of winning days, ratio of average amounts of money made on winning days/ average amounts of money lost on losing days, and any other statistics which might be illustrative of trading patterns
* Thoughts about trading objectives
* Examples of experiences in dealing with analysts, risk management, and management—including communication issues, command and control issues in the organization and the like in order to empower the team by initiating openness and the sharing of vulnerabilities
* Receptivity to coaching—how much the team can admit to vulnerability and the need for support
* Spreadsheets illustrating the sizing of positions, hedging strategies, and level of conviction of ideas
The more you bring to the table, the bigger the impact the meeting will have on you and your team and the more you will accomplish during the session. If you really put yourself out there, by exposing some of your own performances as well as the performances of the people on your team, and if you are willing to explore the good and the bad, what works and what doesn’t work for yourself as well as your team members, then you will walk away with a huge win in terms of understanding behavioral and attitudinal changes in yourself and others.
This open dialogue will translate into profit potential in your own trading and that of your team. Perhaps most importantly such a dialogue invites the opportunity to break through and develop team connections. There is suddenly an opportunity for everyone to see that leadership is not about demanding something from people but about providing a setting in which everyone can voice concerns, fears, self-doubts, differences, and even disagreements without fear of retribution.
Group discussions encourage people to see the nature of sharing, help overcome the natural reluctance of others to speak out, and challenge the status quo. As team members learn to share their dreams and identify everyday obstacles in the life of the organization, what often emerges is an amazing interaction that was not previously present due to fear or lack of time or opportunity. Such discussions will help foster a sense of teamwork, loyalty, and motivation as well as motivate better performances and a more competitive edge.
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Larry Jacobs, Editor of Traders World Magazine interviews Ari on the ability to master your fears in the face of uncertainty and change in the market. Download the mp3 file here
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INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
BY TRANG HO Posted 1/2/2008
Mastering the markets requires controlling one's emotions as much as understanding fundamentals and...
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