The former Chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE) Jack Welch once famously said that “When you were made a leader you were not given a crown, you were given the responsibility to bring out the best in others”. Nothing could be truer than this. As the year 2020 came to an end, now is the best time for business leaders to pause and reflect on the past year, review what they did well and what require improvement. One irrefutable fact of life is growth as they say growth is life. In order to grow, one skill that every businessperson should undeniably possess is leadership. It is the leadership quality that sets the best apart from the rest. Irrespective of the discipline you are in, having laser sharp leadership skill is instrumental for your success.
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, become more, you are a leader.” John Quincy Adams (6th President of United States of America)
Leaders all over the world find an opportunity every day to become better and greater than they were yesterday. Leadership skis are skills common-sense techniques, though society insists of making it complicated. What matters the most to leas is a person’s courage and determination to help others make progress and leave the world better than they found it. It is incorrect to assume that leaders are born. Leaders are made and leadership skills can be acquired. It all depends upon one’s willingness to learn those skills.
Also read: Can You Be A Good Leader Without Being A Good Follower First?
If you feel yourself running on empty, or feeling stuck in a dormant situation, you need to pause and think if you are on the right track. We all want to become leaders, nothing wrong in it. But does it ever occur to you to become a follower? Difficult to digest, isn’t it? It is probably the most neglected fact of life. In order to become a good leader, you need to become a good follower. You need to follow your inner sense before you can bring the leader in you. Here are the 6 techniques to bring out the leader enslaved in yourself.
Be yourself: Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde. Nothing could be more insulting to a man to tries to be other. It always pays to be yourself instead of pretending to be someone else. Peoples love to follow a leader who is real and genuine instead of a Xerox copy of some other well-known leader.
Should is probably the most degenerating word in English. You should do this. You should do that. It is the time to replace “should” with “can”. I can do this and I can do that. What exactly you want? What fires in your belly? You need to reprogram your thoughts. You have only one life. Either live in in your way or follow the ways of other. Choice is yours.
Take responsibility: We all make choices from dawn to dusk. And these choices, in turn, make us. It is immature and disgusting if you refuse to take responsibility of the consequences of your choices. Take full responsibility of your choices. It will delight others and strengthened their belief in you.
Know thyself: There is an ancient Greek aphorism that says know yourself. It is an irony that the person you least know in the world is none other than yourself. What you can do and what you cannot? What are your strengths and weaknesses? And what are your core values? Did you ever try to answer these burning questions? Be honest. In the fruitless effort of pleasing other, you tend to forget that you too have the right to be pleased. Find the ways to alight your thoughts with the work you do.
Be willing to accept yourself: After knowing yourself, it is the time to accept yourself. It would be a capital mistake if you think it like accepting all your mistakes and weaknesses as they come with you. While your strengths need to improve further, your weaknesses are deserve your attention for their complete elimination. Peoples love to see their leaders at peace with themselves. For a very simple reason, if you are not at ease with yourself, how you can be expected to make others at ease with yourself.
Embrace challenges with open arms: There is always resistance against change. Peoples want to maintain the status quo. You can always turn your challenges into opportunities for growth. Challenges can rightly be said as opportunities in disguise. It irritates them the most if peoples observe their leaders avoiding challenges. After all ,it is the challenges that stimulate growth in life.
Liberate yourself from narrow beliefs: Just as you cannot pour more water to an already filled glass, it is unlikely to expect your mind will absorb new ideas if it is already filled with old and obsolete stuff. As a parachute works only when it is open, your mind will also work only when it is open to new ideas. In computer sciences, there is a concept garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) that says that flawed, or non-sense input will result into flawed and non-sense output. This principle can be applied more generally and it can safely be concluded that a mind filled with flawed and obsolete ideas will produce only flawed and obsolete solutions to problems in hands. You need to liberate yourself from olden beliefs and step out of your comfort zone and take actions.
The irrefutable reality is, everyone is a natural leader. It is futile to expect that you will lead others naturally if you are not leading yourself first. Introspect yourself first. Get to know yourself before you claim to know others. It is the high time to bring out the leader in you. In Tireless, Kim Lorenz shared his thought that “You and only you, make the choices you make. Believing in opportunity, and believing that opportunities are in front of you all the time, helps you make better decisions and look for what is in front of you yet often not visualized. It is the leaders—those who see the opportunity disguised as a problem—who think through solutions and become partners in the positive changes needed. You can make that decision to be part of positive change, and you can start today.”
