For the month of February, JLI’s blog challenges you to answer this simple question.
Why Should Anyone be Led by You?
Some leadership attributes might include:
- Capturing people’s hearts, minds and spirit
- Showing people you are human, selectively revealing weaknesses
- Being a “sensor” collecting soft people data that lets you rely on intuition
- Managing with “tough empathy” – care passionately about them and their work
- Daring to be different, capitalizing on your uniqueness
Do you agree? Do you have these attributes? Or do you have others that would make you a good leader?
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The item that stands out to me is “showing people you are human, selectively revealing weaknesses”. This shows confidence in yourself, which is important in gaining respect, which of course must exist to be a leader.
A similar trait to showing people you are human is taking ownership of mistakes. Most everyone knows about the debacle at the Miss Universe pageant, where Steve Harvey called the wrong name for the winner. A potential career ending mistake. Instead, he immediately took full responsibility for the mistake (rather than point fingers or make excuses) and the crisis was averted. A great lesson for all of us.
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Hopefully, we as a profession are realizing that our “positional leadership” as The Architect has eroded significantly, and yet we are well “positioned” to assume unprecedented leadership opportunities in ever-broadening contexts – if we but learn how to earn “permission leadership”. The stated attributes are some good suggestions for doing such. How many more “leadership arrows” can we put in our quiver?
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One must own up to mistakes and not try to cover or blame others. That can only make things worse.
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I think that being a “sensor” as it is described is a really important factor in leadership. Knowing who you are working with and having the ability to read them, even when they may not come out and tell you exactly what they are feeling allows you to better judge situations and find new way to motivate a team. You must recognize that not all personalities are the same, but all individuals are important to group success.
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I think leaders many times have various weaknesses. Being a leader doesn’t mean you are the strongest. Being a leader requires you to know your weaknesses, build a team who has individual strengths that balance your own weaknesses, nurturing those strengths and developing them to their full potential, and provide a focus or a path by which you all can use your collective strengths to achieve something great.
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Being a leader doesn’t mean you have to be loud, pushy and arrogant about what you do or say. My take on being a leader is to be quiet, listen, learn, be “Zen like” and then provide those who will observe your actions and words with a positive understanding of what you are saying or doing. Remember it is always better to be quiet until you have something really to say…..or do.
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