Being the Oil

Ever wonder what keeps some teams working like well-oiled machines?  You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?  It’s the leader.  If you’re a great leader, then you are the oil that keeps your team moving almost effortlessly towards whatever objective has been set.

As a  great leader you’ve got insight into the strengths and challenges of each and every team member.  You’ve got a sense of what they can do individually, but more importantly, you’ve got a sense of what they can accomplish together.  Moreover, you’ve got a sense of how they can best come together in order to be the most effective team in service of whatever your objective is.  Once you’ve got them coming together, you are then the oil that works to keep each cog, so to speak, moving smoothly within the frame of other cogs so that all works together.

Leadership is about recognizing how you can grease the wheels of your team most effectively, so you can harness the greatest output of energy from your team.  Every leadership skill you possess — from communication, to conflict resolution, to modeling, to challenging — contributes to your ability to keep the team wheels moving smoothly.

Bottom-line:  while the analogy might not be great, I believe it’s accurate.  As a leader, you are the oil that keeps your team machine working smoothly.

What do The Others Think?

I’ve done a few posts recently about leadership and listening, specifically about how the latter enhances the former.  Today’s post is going to take this a little further.  As a leader, I want you to consider how good you are at entertaining the ideas of others.

When it comes to leading effectively, you know by now (at least you do if you’ve been reading these posts!) that effective listening is integral to phenomenal leadership.  Listening in and of itself, however, isn’t enough.  You’ve got to be willing to entertain the ideas of others, entertain the possibility that you might be wrong,  and entertain the notion that “their” ideas may be more merit-filled than your own.  In fact, the ideas that are out there in the brains of others, may often hold the best solutions to whatever problem you’re facing in any given moment.

To be an effective leader, it behooves you to ask the question, “what do you think?” at least as often as you put forward your own ideas.  Furthermore, asking the question requires you to pay attention to the answer.  Really pay attention.  Hold the answer with respect and understand that you do not have the best answers all the time.  You may have the best answers some of the time; and so might others.

Bottom-line: the best leaders are not only willing to listen to others, they’re willing to entertain the ideas of others and even implement those ideas from time-to-time.  As a great leader  you understand that the world does not revolve around you.  This is another hallmark of great leadership

Want to Be a Great Leader? Get Over Yourself

One of the facts of leadership is that the buck, ultimately, stops with you.  That’s right; when you wear the mantle of leadership you assume the ultimate responsibility of many things.  In light of this, it can be easy to hoard responsibilities and tasks, forgetting the importance of the team alongside you.  Really effective leaders, however, know that while the buck stops with them, true success requires the efforts of everyone.

In order to be the best leader you possibly can, you’ve got to remember that leaders are only recognizable as such if they have followers.  And the only way to have followers is to see yourself as one of them, even as you recognize your role as leader.  It’s a bit of a balancing act, to be sure. As a leader you need to enlist the support of your followers, asking them to help the cause in ways that maximize their individual strengths even while their help supports your vision.  In other words, you’ve got to be able to put aside the idea that you are the be-all and end-all of you mission, and recognize that the people around you are who will ultimately guarantee the success of your plan — or not.

Bottom-line:  great leaders have great followers, and enlist the support of those great followers at every turn.  Real leaders know how to set their egos aside and ask for help.  Real leaders make themselves part of the team instead of holding themselves apart.  Want to be a great leader?  Then you need to get over yourself.

When Insecurity Sets In

Insecurity.  It’s that feeling that comes over you when you’re not sure of what you’re doing, when you feel like you haven’t got the answers, when it seems like others are privy to information that eludes you.  Sometimes, the insecurity stems from a real place or circumstance –  you actually don’t know what you’re doing, or you don’t have the information.  At other times, it’s a figment of your imagination — for whatever reason you’re minimizing what you are capable of and playing small.  In either case, the question for your leadership is this:  how are you dealing with the insecurity?  And how is your approach serving your leadership?

Often, I’ve seen leaders who are in the insecure space attempt to puff themselves up, pulling a “fake it till you make it” attitude, trying to convince themselves and others that they actually are fine.  If you’re using this approach, you may well be isolating yourself, striving to prove yourself without assistance in an effort to show exactly what you’re capable of.  What I know for sure is that this approach doesn’t work.  Instead, people usually see right through it, and the insecurity becomes magnified.  If you’re working so hard to hide what you don’t know, your efforts aren’t going into leadership, they’re going into pretending.  And if you’re pretending to lead, you’re not leading.

So what’s the solution? Acknowledge where you’re falling short, what you don’t know, what you need.  You know that there are people around you who can help.  You don’t have to make yourself less than them in anyway; instead, you need to access their expertise in order to enhance your own.  As a leader, there is something you bring to the table, no doubt about it.  And, you’re as human as the next person, which means — like it or not — you don’t know everything, you don’t have all the answers.  Utilize your team, the people surrounding you, to fill in the gaps that exist.  That’s why they’re part of your team.  Don’t allow insecurity to get the better of you, or have you believe that “asking for help is a sign of weakness.”  This is not true.  Real leaders, effective leaders, know how to ask for help graciously.  Real leaders don’t fake their leadership in anyway.  Real leaders lead by example, and that includes acknowledging what you don’t know and inviting others to support you in leading.

Bottom-line: even leaders have moments of insecurity.  The question is, what are you going to do about it?  If you’re really going to lead, you’ve got to learn to ask for help.

Effective Leaders Know How to Share

“If I don’t do it myself, it won’t be done properly.”  As a leader, if you subscribe to any version of this belief — the idea that it’s got to be done by you and you alone — then you are not leading effectively.  You are leading — probably holding a vision, moving towards a specific objective — but you are failing to recognize that success requires a team approach.  Ask anyone who’s made it big in any industry — even in individual sport — and you’ll discover that they’ve enlisted the help of others to get them to the pinnacle of their success.

This can seem counter-intuitive, I know.  If you hold a leadership position, then the buck stops with you, so-to-speak.  And that sort of responsibility can lead to a sense of needing to do everything yourself.  However, the most effective leadership strategy involves a shared approach to the task at hand.  There’s a willingness to inspire and empower others to support you in achieving the objective — and even a willingness to let them find their own approach to what needs to be done.  In other words, effective leaders do not micromanage.

If you’re a leader, and you’re feeling the weight of your role in any way, shape, or form, I would invite you to look at your approach to leadership.  Are you holding the responsibility solely on your shoulders?  If so, it’s time to start divesting yourself of the burden.  Because shared leadership is where it’s at.

Someone’s Walking With You

One of the things that I’ve been taught — or at least that I’ve assimilated as a belief somewhere along the line — is the idea that nobody can walk my journey for me; I’ve got to walk my journey on my own.  At first glance, and indeed when I look at my life, I can see how this can be construed as the absolute truth.  I mean really, I cannot walk your life’s journey, nor can you walk mine.  The challenge with this belief, however, is the often-made extrapolation that you must, therefore, walk your journey entirely alone.  What I’m coming to realize in a really big way is that this is far from the truth.  While it may be true that only I can walk my path, it is equally true that I never walk alone — I’ve actually got a support team walking with me.

I’m not trying to be all religious here.  I am, however, trying to draw your attention to a spiritual truth that overrides whatever you may hold as religious beliefs.  The truth is this:  the universe as a whole has always got your back, and you are surrounded — by virtue of the fact that you live in a world of human beings galore — by people who can walk alongside you and help you, if you’re willing to enlist them on your journey.  This is a vital point to understand because, when you realize that you are not alone, you also realize that you’re capable of more than you might do on your own.  Working with a team is guaranteed to get you greater results than when you fly solo — when you look at all successful people you quickly realize that nobody is successful on their own.

So, here’s what needs to happen.  No matter what you consider your life’s purpose to be, it’s time for you to recognize that as you move to fulfill this purpose, you do in fact have people in your corner to support you, and it is essential that you lean in and grab their energy for support .  If this isn’t immediately obvious to you, don’t fret.  Keep your eyes and ears open and on the lookout for your supporters, let go of any who are obviously non-supporters in order to make room for your team, and keep moving forward.  Feel the support that it naturally around you, and move ahead.  That’s the way to accomplish whatever it is you’re up to in this world.

Bottom-line:  you are not alone, even when you’re walking your path to infinity.  Life is good.