It has always amazed me how much conflicting information is published regarding the term leadership. Leading people can be an amazing and rewarding experience but it can also be an extremely frustrating and stressful experience. Do you get a choice in the kind of experience you will have as a leader? The short answer is, Yes.
My definition of leadership
“The ability to take a group of individuals, create a cohesive team, and accomplish a goal together.”
Leadership really can be that simple. In the beginning, what you have is a collection of individuals. It is the leader’s job to create a cohesive team. The leader must leverage a culture that already exist or create a culture that individuals can rally around to accomplish a goal together. If you go to work at a large corporate bank you are going to be wearing business attire everyday and there will be an existing culture that you leverage. If you work in silicon valley in the software industry most people are going to be wearing T-shirts and blue jeans. They might work until 3:00 am in the morning and sleep until noon just to do the same thing again the next day. As a leader, you must adapt to the environment and the culture to be successful.
One of the first steps to becoming a leader is understanding the purpose of leadership. A person does not need to be the CEO of General Motors to lead. The business world needs great leaders at every level of the organization. People want to be led by great leaders and there are great leaders everywhere we look in society today. If you are an entrepreneur or business executive and people are reporting to you today you are in a leadership position. You need to become a student of leadership and create your own personal leadership doctrine that will guide your actions everyday. That starts with an in-depth understanding of leadership.
Human interaction is what makes leadership difficult. Your job is to understand the personalities and strengths of those on your team and ensure they mesh together as a cohesive team. A team helps each of the members of the team. A team has a common goal that they rally around to accomplish. A team is unselfish to the pursuit of their common goal. This doesn’t just happen. The leader needs to create and foster an environment where teamwork flourishes.
It takes a tremendous amount of confidence in yourself to be a successful leader. You have to know yourself as a leader. You must be very self aware of your strengths and weaknesses. Let’s take a second to look at a few things leadership should be and what leadership should not be:
Leadership should be:
- Building a cohesive team. The group of individuals have to believe they are a team and have confidence in the team.
- Defining the tasks and goals that the team should accomplish.
- Communicating your vision often.
- Being able to make hard decisions.
- Building consensus.
- Knowing when to forget about consensus and just make a decision.
Leadership should not be:
- Ignoring the fact that people want to be a part of a winning team.
- Providing little or no communication or direction to your employees.
- Acting in a selfish manner.
- Being rude to your employees.
- Expecting your employees to know all of the information in your head.
- Attempting to be friends with every person on your team.