the art of leading

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Why is it that time passes by so fast when we’re reading a great book? There’s something about it that just enthralls you into a hypnotic state of mind and sort of fall into a deep trance. When you wake up, you’re done with the book. Time was accelerated. You rode a spaceship through a black hole and ended up somewhere else, and someTIME else.

The same thing can be said about exceptional leaders. You are embedded within their ideas. You are invited to capture those ideas. A short time later you find yourself totally entranced by the shadow that they cast.

You feel what the leader feels, in the same way that a great author makes you feel what a character in the book is feeling. Or what the author himself is feeling. You let yourself go, and the leader, or the author, catches you in his or her arms to direct you. To direct you with your permission. To direct you with your complete willingness. Because you’re in their trance.

Just ask the following question to anyone who has followed such a unique leader, especially in the workplace: What was it like to work for him? I’m pretty sure a big chunk will automatically enter a trance-like state and start reminiscing of the time they spent under the leader’s wings.

They will smile and tell you, “Time passed so quickly. I would’ve loved to work for her for a longer time.”

Leaders are like books. The great ones will make time pass quickly. They will teach you life-changing lessons. They will leave you yearning for more. Poor ones will be a bore. You’ll find them tedious and insignificant. They will leave you in a state of exhaustion.

Readers will create very vivid images in their minds as the book develops. Authors created those images. Followers of a great leader will be full of creative ideas that solve problems for an organization. Leaders created those ideas.

The reason why so many authors have created revolutions, trends, and movements, I believe is due to their ability to create images in the minds of readers. They may be violent, or enjoyable, or sad, or happy, or peaceful, or calm, or quiet, or loud. But readers act out, sometimes in a subconscious way, these ideas and images. And as a result, revolutions happen. Or inventions are inspired. Or  controversies are sparked.

So to become a great leader, become a great author first. Create images in the minds of followers that will move them to act. Move people through ideas, as an author does. Make time pass by in the blink of an eye. Be an author of greatness.

Categories : Confidence, General Leadership, Goals, Personal Development, Relationships // Add Comment »

Generally, every great leader has one trait that stands out from the others. They have one characteristic that identifies them. It may be related to personality, or to leadership style, or to other areas. What many of these leaders understand that many don’t is that the way you naturally are can be used to your advantage. It is true that you should always strive for improvement and development of skills you don’t have. If you are so timid that you aren’t able to communicate, then you have a problem. You won’t be able to communicate your vision! But even if you improve that area of your life and find the courage to meet new people and have a healthy social life, you might still be a reserved person. There isn’t anything wrong with that. It took a while for me to accept that being a reserved person didn’t mean I was doomed to obscurity. Granted, I have learned how to better cope with my timidity. I realized it was holding me back in many areas. But that doesn’t mean I have to be insincere to myself as to who I really am! Learn how to embrace your true self and use your personality to your advantage as a leader. But before doing that, you need to identify what characteristic you naturally have, that may be used as your leadership ‘brand’. I recommend you ask yourself the following questions to accomplish that:

How do you solve problems?

The answer to this question may tell you a lot about your personality. When a problematic situation arises, do you prefer to go by your gut instincts to solve it? Or do you carefully gather the facts, analyze the situation and try to build consensus? Do you prefer that nobody gets hurt? Or are you totally oblivious to the consequences that your decision might have? There is no right or wrong question. Every style has its place, depending upon the situation. Neither are they exclusive of the other answer. Sometimes styles may be synergistic. But generally, most people lean toward one side more than the other. You should discover, if it’s not already obvious to you, which are your inclinations. Stay mindful of that, and trust your style.

What are you passionate about?

Your passions may communicate a lot about you. Obviously, nobody is defined by their interests or hobbies. But they’re pretty good signs. Perhaps your free time revolves around finding out the best way to jump out of an airplane in mid-flight. I might be inclined to think that you’re comfortable with taking significant risks. That attitude could definitely be an asset when acting as a leader!

What do you think you’re good at?

Your skills in various areas of life may be symbolic of characteristics you could use to develop yourself as a leader. For example, a person may be a brilliant robot-builder. Maybe that person is detail-oriented. Detail-oriented leaders definitely have a role to play in society. I understand this may be too broad of a generalization, but you should use this as a guideline.

What do others think about you?

Most times people overestimate themselves. Other times people may ignore a very positive characteristic they have. That is where family, friends, and perhaps even complete strangers come into play. Others may see things you don’t. Try to ask them about what they think you are good at. Ask them about your negative characteristics. If they’re honest and trustful, they should be of great help in assisting you in discovering potential leadership strengths.

Develop that strength

Warren Buffet, the great investor, was capable of using one very specific characteristic he had to build a multi-billion dollar business like Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., of which he is CEO, and becoming one of the richest men alive. In Buffet: The Making of an American Capitalist, author Roger Lowenstein describes how Buffet was always avert to venturing into unknown territory. Throughout his career, he has made it a central element of his philosophy to never invest in any company he doesn’t understand. That doesn’t mean he stands on the sidelines and doesn’t bother to learn, but he is careful to only invest in companies he fully understands. Another trait he is famous for is his Omaha hospitality. People are drawn to him when he talks because of that. In fact, he has a cult-like following that is characteristic of great leaders. So, once you have a pretty good idea of what are those one or two strong characteristics that are capable of catapulting you into mastering the Art of Leading, focus on them. ‘Brand’ yourself. Make it easy for others to identify you.

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1. Never value your journey as a success.
People who consider the achievement of the ultimate goal as the only possible way to achieve success are perfect prospects to never be good leaders. It is a perfect way to fail as a leader. Leaders, naturally, are driven and desire to accomplish the realization of a vision. That is one of the things that characterize them. But they also are set apart because they see each step in the way to realization as a small success. If you never value your journey as a success, then you’ll end up being a very unhappy person, since you’ll have to wait a long time before you can know what ’success’ feels like.

2. Never delegate.
Successful leaders know how to delegate. So it follows that if you want to suck at leadership, you can’t delegate anything. If that’s what you want, just hoard every little detail inside your circle of responsiblity and forget about the big picture. If you try to do everything by yourself, you’ll end up with so much unimportant details that you won’t have any time or energy to dedicate to the really significant stuff such as…being a leader instead of a task administrator.

3. Never point out anything positive about the people who surround you.
This is the perfect way to sink into leadership hell. So if your goal is to be a bad leader, then you absolutely need to put this principle into play. In fact, a faster way to destroying relationships is to not only withhold compliments, but express negative comments about those who surround you. This will create resentment toward you, which means that they won’t want to follow you, or do anything that you want them to do.

4. Never consider leadership as a means.
Those who most frequently fail at the game of leadership are those who see it as a material object to be attained, instead of a means to attain something that is meaningful to society or a part of it. Successful leaders, on the other hand, get to practice leadership because they want to express themselves and their vision. They aren’t leaders just for the sake of being leaders.

5. Never think of leadership as a way to serve others.
This is a very important message to those who want to fail as leaders: just serve yourself. Become a leader out of mere self-interest and you’ll be well on your way to being a perfect failure as a leader. Great leaders have a purpose that is greater than themselves. Just do the opposite if you want to be their opposite.

6. Stump whoever is beneath you.
This is another great way to destroy your chances of failure. When you get to the “top”, just start taking those “beneath” you for granted. When you come crashing down in the future, nobody will be there to help you up, since you destroyed all those meaningful relationships with people who are now on “top” of you.

7. Never read, just watch reality shows over and over again.
Great leaders don’t stop learning. They read every type of book they can get their hands on, and take a critical point of view toward them, which will help them when analyzing real-world situations. They focus on books and even art and music that expand their critical and analytical capabilities. So, if you want to fail as a leader, it’s simple: watch every reality show out there. Those are perfect to kill your brain cells, since they not only don’t require you to think, but encourage you to be dumber. There is nothing better that you can do to decrease your critical and analytical abilities than listening to Paris Hilton or Britney Spears or some random dude talk about their dog’s nails.

8. Never mold your own environment.
If you want to do everything in your power to suck at leadership, let circumstances and your environment mold you . Truly successful leaders are those who see something they don’t like and strive to change it. They aren’t bogged down by petty day-to-day events. They go out and create their own set of favorable circumstances instead of letting the likes and wants of others destroy their visions.

9. Never fail.
This may be the most important principle to follow in your quest to leadership insignificance. True leaders come to see failures and mistakes as learning vehicles. In fact, they come to look forward to these situations, because they know that in every failure, they will find an equally significant or greater success. If you want to stay stuck at where you are right now, then don’t do anything differently. Don’t risk failing, since it will only bring you unlimited opportunities, and someone who would never want to be a leader would never want that.

Categories : Communication, Failure, General Leadership, Goals, Personal Development, Recognition, Relationships // 2 Comments »

Let’s face it. Leadership is not an overnight thing. Very few of us are handed the power to influence large masses or even small corporate departments. But we can do small, simple things each day to put our leadership skills to practice, and develop those that we need to improve. Here are some of those things:

1. Persuade a friend to do the right thing.
2. Praise your kids for things well done.
3. Find support for that special project at work you’ve always thought about.
4. Join the Toastmasters, Rotary, Lions, etc.
5. Speak up at class, if you’re a student.
6. Start a non-profit in support of your cause.
7. Start a business.
8. Speak up on behalf of someone who can’t.
9. Recommend something to someone.
10. Give thanks to someone for something.
11. Volunteer to give a speech, and give.
12. Start a blog.
13. Send a letter to your newspaper.
14. Meet someone. new.
15. Learn something new about someone you already know.
16. Teach something you know to someone who doesn’t.
17. Volunteer to be the team leader at school or work, when asked.
18. Build something without following instructions.
19. Pick the restaurant for your date tonight.
20. Run for office in you community.
21. Turn off the TV, so you can read more.
22. Stand up straight.
23. Act confidence when you interact with others.
24. Offer to help around the house.
25. Help an old lady cross the street.

Categories : Action, Confidence, General Leadership, Personal Development // Add Comment »

Picture yourself five years ago. What are your dreams? What are your goals? What are your plans? Are you pretty sure that you’re gonna’ reach them? How confident are you? Do you have your next five years planned out to perfection?

Now come back to the present. Did you actually reach them? To what extent? Of course, everything didn’t go exactly as planned. Maybe you achieved all your goals. Or maybe you simply stalled. Or maybe you have been hit by the storms of everyday life, as is normal.

That happens too. We think we’re Supermen or Superwomen and suddenly something happens to change our course. [Read more →]

Categories : Action, Change, Failure, General Leadership, Goals, Personal Development // 2 Comments »

Brains, Guts, and the Capacity to Act

By Stephen H. Baum

author of What Made jack welch Jack Welch

What allows a leader to take the steps needed to solve a problem or master a
difficult situation? What keeps the desire to act from being impetuous and
uninformed, as in “ready, fire, aim” behavior? The answer is that the
capacity to act effectively and decisively is a complex mixture of brain and
gut, a combination I call threads in thinking. It includes these qualities:

* An ability to distill a situation to its simplest dynamics; to
understand the issues and the consequences of doing nothing; and to
formulate a specific plan.

* Being extro-spective: seeing the business in the larger context of
the industry and in the marketplace; seeing a situation from a high-altitude
view and making sense of it on the ground.

* For opportunities, an ability to see the true benefits and risks,
which are not always obvious.

* Possession of a mental library of truly relevant analogies and other
mental models that can be applied to characterize the situation in a way
helpful for making a choice.

* An ability to identify valuable sources of advice, experience, and
wisdom (inside the company and out); to elicit information and know when to
do so.

* An instinct for calibrating the value of and motive for facts and
information people are giving you, the subtext of real agendas.

* An ability to discern both financial and nonfinancial impacts and
include them in the calculus (company reputation, morale, future business
options), then weigh the risks.

* An ability to anticipate issues and define a point of view so you
don’t have to do it for the first time under crisis.

* Being able to think a couple of moves ahead, as in chess, or as
Steve Kaufman put it: “the ability to look around the corner and see what’s
coming.” This ability and most of the others can be tested and developed.

It’s a tall order, but remember that no one starts out with all of these
abilities. You develop these threads and judgment only with experience. This
is done mainly through on-the-job training. Just remember how many of the
leaders we’ve been discussing failed in school, how many were far from the
top of their class, how none were rocket scientists. Only by working through
major challenges in the first place do you develop and nurture these
abilities until they become part of you and part of your instinct.

In the Eye of the Storm

Deciding that you must act, and then acting, is not as straightforward as it
seems. Circumstances will often make your decision to take action in the
first place very challenging. Remember [Read more →]

Categories : Action, Communication, Confidence, General Leadership, Loyalty, Personal Development, Proactivity, Relationships, Responsibility // Add Comment »

Treatment that produces an emotional and psychological impact is said to have therapeutic effects. Therapists dedicate themselves to help patients reach states of positive emotions and psychological well-being. Leaders can exert those therapeutic effects through their leadership methods. I would call that therapeutic leadership.

Leadership is a social force with concrete consequences. When the level of influence of one person reaches respectable heights, whatever that person does may determine the feelings of an anonymous follower.

Leaders have the capacity to impact people in an emotional and psychological way. I don’t know if this has any scientific value, since I’m neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. But it seems to me that leaders may be able to exert a very specific emotional or mental impact on any one individual who happens to listen or follow them.

What’s the point, you ask? Well, I’d like for you as a leader to be accountable for what you say and do. You should be aware of the impact that you may have on your followers. I’m not implying that you should be paternalistic and that you should be everyone’s therapist.

At least be conscious of your actions. The shadow that those actions throw over your followers may be bigger than you thought. The first step toward practicing therapeutic leadership, then, is to simply be aware.

Categories : Change, Communication, Personal Development, Relationships, Responsibility // Add Comment »

Yesterday I talked about stupid people. Today I’ll talk about smart people. Both stupid and smart people hold strong to their beliefs. But the beliefs of stupid people are prejudicial and close-minded. The beliefs of smart people are well analyzed and open-minded.

The first step to being smart, as opposed to stupid, is to exercise your intelligence and adaptive capacity, which set you apart from ants and lizards. I told you how human beings are supposed to be “smart”. It isn’t too difficult. Just look for whatever caused you to screw up, fix it, and try not to repeat it.

Read and learn about different ways to attack the same problems. Explore and search for new answers to old questions. Make new questions. Fix old answers. Learn from your mistakes and apply those lessons. Accept your errors and amend them. Adapt to circumstances. Be open to change and criticism. All these are somewhat simplistic ways of being what human beings are supposed to be: smart.

Categories : Failure, General Leadership, Personal Development // Add Comment »

Just as imperfection makes us human, so does logical reasoning. When humans screw up, they normally look for whatever caused that screw-up, fix it, and try not to repeat it. That is what I consider a very elemental level of intelligence. That “mistake-recognition” skill also shows what many call adaptive capacity.

Other species in the animal kingdom, like ants and lizards, don’t have the capacity to go through this marvelous process. These other animals don’t learn from their mistakes; they just endlessly repeat them. They don’t recognize mistakes, and they aren’t able to adapt in the same logical way that human beings do.

Stupid people are very much like ants and lizards. But ants and lizards can be forgiven. Stupid people cannot. They’re human, and they’re supposed to have intelligence and adaptive capacity. They obviously make mistakes, as does everyone else. That makes everyone human, so that doesn’t make them particularly stupid.

What sets them apart from smart people is the fact that they don’t know if and when they have made a mistake. Furthermore, they don’t know what to do when they do make them. They deny their faults even when they know they are at fault.

They lack what ants and lizards lack too, which is logical reasoning. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you’ll keep screwing up over and over again. That is called being a stupid person.

Categories : Failure, Personal Development, Proactivity // 1 Comment »

There are multiple traits, characteristics, skills, and abilities that you should develop to discover your leadership. There are many ways to go about this growth process. But whatever method you use, you should first take care of yourself. In other words, you should lead yourself before you lead others.

How do you lead yourself? Well, the most sensible way to get on the right track is to ‘put your house in order’. Simply feel good about yourself. Feel confident about your abilities. Convince yourself that you have the capacity to lead, and that you ought to be a leader. It is only with self-confidence that you will be able to provide a foundation for your followers. Leaders are supposed to provide stability to followers; perhaps a stability that those followers don’t have. Many are counting on their leaders to facilitate that foundation that they haven’t been able to create for themselves. So if the leader doesn’t have that strong foundation, it is impossible to transmit it to anyone else. Perhaps you’re a good actor and attract a following at first, by making people believe that you do have self-confidence. But that building without a foundation will soon crumble.

The remainder of this post will concentrate on some tactics that you should put into practice if you want to be self-confident:

• Set a goal or purpose- If you don’t know what you want, you will never have self-confidence. Self-confidence is all about believing that you are capable of achieving something. But you have to know what that something is. If you don’t, then you have nothing to be confident about! First outline a strong purpose, a ‘North Star’ that you can look towards so you know where you’re headed. This may be as simple (but supremely important) as raising a loving family or as complex as changing the way the world communicates. Nevertheless, it should have some specificity to it, so that you can direct your energy and efforts. Bill Gates didn’t just say “My goal is to change the world”, but “I want every household to have a personal computer.” That certainly changed the world, but in a much more targeted way.

• Prepare- Simply, you should know what you’re talking about. Knowing that you dominate your area will give you the feeling that you have the power to talk authoritatively about anything that involves your scope of influence. Now, I’m not saying you can learn everything there is to know, since you should always strive to know more than the day before. But if you get to a point where you can reasonably say that you dominate your field more than most people, you will have the right to consider yourself an authority. You will have the right to be sure that whatever you say is correct. Now that is self-confidence!

• Practice- Your have multiple scopes of influence. You influence your family, your classmates, your work buddies, your students, your mentors, your bosses, and even complete strangers that you meet in the street. In other words, you have many opportunities to develop your leadership skills. Practice by cheering up a work companion. Propose a cost-cutting process at work. Get involved in clubs and devise initiatives. Take advantage of all those opportunities and use them to consciously practice being a leader.

• Achieve small victories- Some time back I started a short-lived sports tournament business. It failed disastrously. But I did learn many lessons out of that ‘failure’, if you can call it that. One that will especially stick with me is the impact that small victories may have on my confidence levels. A central part of the business depended on raising sponsorship money to cover costs. It is definitely not an easy task, but when I raised my first $50, I felt I was capable of finding $100, and so on. That venture later ‘failed’, but I have nothing to be ashamed of if just because I learned this lesson.

• Talk to yourself- I once thought that I was crazy because I talked to myself. I had these wild pep talks while I was alone in the car or in the shower. But I later found out that many positive and confident people do this. It’s a great way to foster a positive attitude. I feel that after having a solo pep talk, that ‘fake’ or ‘built-up’ confidence carries on to the street. It goes without saying that this should be a positive talk, not a negative one. It works either way.

• Act confident- A variation of the ’solo pep talk’ is to act confident. It has been proven that physical actions and emotions go hand in hand. It was commonly believed that actions always follow emotions. But it is now accepted that your physical acts have an effect in your emotional state. If you feel sad, smile. Maybe you feel weird at first, but that simple act may put you on your way to a more positive attitude. In the same way, if you feel unsure about yourself, act as if you were confident. Stand up, put your shoulders back, smile, and talk authoritatively. You may start feeling truly self-confident in a while. Now, this tactic shouldn’t be used by itself, but when you don’t have any more time to prepare or practice, it is all you can do. And it works.

• TRUST YOURSELF- If you have done everything that I described, there is absolutely no reason at all to feel down on yourself. Simply let go of all mental barriers and go on with your mission!

By now the importance of self-confidence should be obvious. Do you want to project confidence? Do you want to gain a loyal following? Then you should start by gaining self-confidence. You should lead yourself so that you can lead others.

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