Newsflash — THEY Might Be Right, You Might Be Wrong

You’re a leader and you’ve got some great ideas.  Everybody knows it, including you.  And because you know it, you may well have a tendency to plow ahead without giving a whole lot of consideration to what others have to say.  This tendency to ignore the ideas of others in favour of your own brilliance, however, doesn’t serve your leadership as well as you might think.  Instead, you’ve got to be able — and willing — to listen to those around you.

Now, if you follow my blog posts at all, you might be saying, “hasn’t she already written about listening?”  And you’d be right.  But the idea that leaders must listen is one that bears repeating and highlighting.  And so, I’m taking it from a slightly different angle this time.

You see, while the greatness of your ideas, your vision, and your insight does a lot for your particular brand of leadership, when you stop yourself from entertaining the ideas of others, you sell your leadership short. You really do.  It’s rather like an incestuous relationship, in that your brain actually only has so many ideas available to it — similar to the gene pool within any given family — there’s only so much to pull from.  As a result, when you hold the belief that only you are right, you deny yourself access to a myriad of other rich ideas that may actually benefit and enhance whatever it is you’re striving to create.

Bottom-line:  if you really want your leadership to serve, if you really want to be the best leader you can be, you’ve got to be willing to entertain and listen to the ideas of others.  You may well be right; and somebody else may be as well.  Be willing to listen to those around you, and your leadership will be the better for it.