The Personal Leadership Spiral

Article, Insights

How create sustainable performance with employees and customers

The Personal Leadership Spiral is a dynamic and systemic model for Personal Leadership that can be used in the leadership of yourself and others. It is a consulting, coaching, and communication model designed to help individuals and organizations take action and live out their visions. Thus, the model can be used both in sales leadership and by sales professionals during interactions with customers in self leadership.

Personal Leadership Spiral. How create sustainable performance with employees and customers

4 steps to Personal Leadership

The Personal Leadership Spiral consists of four distinctive steps which overlap and interact at several different levels. This construction is based on – and is essentially a simplification of – Joseph Riggio’s model, The Satisfaction Cycle®, developed in the 1990’s. 

1. Present State+, (PS+). Identify what it is that already works for the system. How does the system work and who is the system when it works? 

2. Desired State++, (DS++). Taking PS+ as your starting point, identify what the system would like to achieve – where it wants to go. How does the system know that the goal has been met? 

3. Process. Take DS++ as your starting point and identify what needs to happen for the system to reach this stage.

4. Just do it! What is the first step to be taken? Take that step immediately!

A dynamic and systemic model

The fundamental structure of The Personal leadership Spiral model assumes that there is a larger system surrounding the system with which, we are working, and that the system with which we are working, reacts in relation to this larger system. Thus, the aim of the model is not to use time and energy on changing the system, we are working with. On the contrary, the aim is to reorient it and expand it – in a constructive way – so that it can accommodate the information from the larger system.

In the case of dynamic systems – and individuals and organizations with living people are always dynamic systems – the process is initiated by starting with what works for the system and then letting the goal rather than the problem define the procedures; otherwise, the problem would become part of the solution, i.e. The Starting Point Counts!

When mastering the 4 steps in The Personal Leadership Spiral in the interactions with your customers, your employees, or others, you move from being an ordinary coach/leader to becoming a genuinely consultative partner – someone who will help the other part obtain what they truly want and what will truly serve them best.