Are you balancing the right mix of your internal leadership personas?

‘Winning from Within’ is this great book by renowned and inspiring leadership expert Erica Ariel Fox of Mobius Executive Leadership. In it, she introduced the practical concept that everybody has multiple leadership personas inside of them. She defines four key personas.

• Dreamer: taps into intuition, sees a path forward, develops a future vision, defines purpose (inner CEO)
• Thinker: focuses on factual assessment, reflection, logic, creating clarity (inner CFO)
• Lover: brings people together, builds trust, has emotional intelligence, creates teams (inner CHRO)
• Warrior: demonstrates willpower, focuses on delivering results, demonstrates courage, speaks hard truths (inner COO)

One persona is not better than the other, but depending on the challenge at hand, a certain combination of personas is more effective. Most leaders in my experience tend to fall back on 1-2 as their more dominant personas, sometimes creating blind spots. What are your more dominant internal personas and potential blindspots?

I have applied the same concept for leadership teams by reviewing if the right level of every persona has a voice in the team for the challenge at hand/journey ahead. Also to let team members appreciate the different personas.