Start by managing what you manage well
High profile leaders get a lot of attention. They are invariably media-savvy and articulate, able to glibly deliver inspiring speeches on the big concepts like mission and vision. Sometimes they even just look good. Never mind what they are saying; you just enjoy watching them say it.
In an age when celebrity status has become the key to newsworthiness, is this the model for leadership? It's as if the glamour CEO defines business leadership in the way a bony cover girl defines the right body shape. In either case, be you the aspiring executive or the hopeful teenager, this is a pretty narrow view of how you should look. And if you don't look like that, what should your response be?
We are swamped with leader-speak. CEO’s write autobiographies about how they did it; management gurus give you the “five really important characteristics of great leaders”.
Google “leadership” and you’ll get a few million tips on how to get “it”.
Haven’t got “it”? Like the anorexic teenager, you can choose to feel bad about it, asking the inevitable “why aren’t I like that?” That’s the sort of question that can hold you back in your career or your business, not to mention your life.
The thing is, you’ve probably already got “it” somewhere. You are you, not all those other people. There is no single style of leader.
Would you have picked out Mark Zuckerberg as a leadership model? Iconic maybe, and great timing, but leader? Or the well told story of the dyslectic Richard Branson? How do you feel about Kim IL Sung?
If you seriously over-analyze leaders, you can probably distil some similarities between Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. They all died of unnatural causes. Hitler died in his bunker by his own hand; Jesus on the cross by the hand of others; and as for young Alexander, popular theory has it that his liver gave up after a really big night in Babylon at age 33.
That doesn’t make those similarities a model for leadership behavior. Neither do a lot of other aspects of their careers. Subject to your beliefs, all three had significant shortcomings.
So do you, but you also have 3 or 4, maybe 5, things, that you are really good at. Try feeling good about them. There might be 100 things required to make a business hum, but if you work on your best five, you’ve got a chance of leading in those areas because you are better at those things that most other people.
What’s more, people will notice. Some of us are great at sales, or operations, or finance, or analysis, or collaborating, or being loyal, or empathic, or strategizing for that matter. It’s a long list but people will follow you in the areas where you set the standard.
You can put whatever your strength is to work right now. Great business leaders emerge from doing what they do best, rising to prominence after strutting their stuff as middle managers. Forget the other 95 things. How can you do your five better?
Find out what you’re good at and how to put it to work in Recharge. You can buy it online here.
