The Leader-Ship: Who’s on board?

The Leader-Ship: Who’s On Board?

What stands in your way? - Stop right here and don’t turn to the next page. List your barriers, fences, walls, barricades, blocks, and excuses to your happiness and the happiness of the people around you.

                                                                          

Did you list yourself as one of your barriers? If you didn’t, then start over and get on board. Your happiness or unhappiness correlates directly towards you and the decisions you make on a daily basis. Try doing something about yourself before you blame anyone else. Whether it’s your weight, your success, or the culture of your organization, start by looking in the mirror. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest barrier of all? You.”  (Sorry, I was just in Disney World).

Now that you’ve overcome the biggest barrier, work with the people around you but when you do, do not expect anything in return. Your leadership ability expands exponentially by the number of leaders you create around you not the number of followers. Watch it work! Empower people.

There has been a plethora of recent dialogue about living a life of imperfection and embracing vulnerability. I agree that we shouldn’t be someone we are not. However, I also wholeheartedly believe that when we examine our imperfections, this provides opportunity to eliminate our shortcomings and proceed in a positive direction that will teach us and the people around us to embrace our leadership capacity.

By creating more leaders, our inadequacies will be reduced both individually and as an organization. Our strengths help each other as we put together a powerful leadership team. As our strengths and opportunities increase synergistically, our weaknesses and threats are reduced significantly.

Leader  By Julie Lang

 The bright star that leads the way.

The sun that provides the world with light.

The rain that falls only in hopes of success and growth,

Wishing to inflict

Pain and failure upon no one.

The rainbow that accepts all just the way they are,

The weeping willow that now stand tall,

The soft whisper of wind that blows until movement has occurred,

That’s you.

And you have made the world a better place.

Being the change you want to see in the world.

The poem Leader was written by one of my former students, Julie. She was a high school student at the time she wrote the poem. Julie understood and still understands the value of leadership at an early age. I hope you will, too.  She’s attending Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina as an education major.

It is never too late to understand and accept your role as a leader but it is never too early, either. We need to value our future. We can make this happen by allowing people to have opportunities we did not have. First, let us take care of ourselves.

Before you get on the Leader-ship, you need a mindset. That mindset should be that you are not ordinary. Too many times we think of ourselves as not capable, and that outlook prohibits our success and our ability to accept our role as a leader. 

CYD

At a staffulty (faculty and staff) meeting, I flashed those three letters up on the big screen: CYD. The audience quickly reverted to their teenaged years and started laughing. You can probably make up a silly acronym without much effort. Then I clicked to the next screen:

“Control Your Destiny – if you don’t, someone else will.” The slide was met with, “Oh that’s what it means.”  

I’m simplifying the leadership process so you can get on board. Let’s eliminate you as a barrier to yourself and get moving. Most of the people complaining can have a simple solution:

“Be the person you want around you.” Or “If you don’t like where you are, leave.”

A few months before I started to write this book, I received a unique email. It was an evite to my fortieth, eighth grade class reunion. The email was ironic in the sense that I was immediately able to reply to the inquiry and attach a picture of my eighth grade class. The reply was not so exceptional because I use that picture all the time when I talk to students and adults about leadership.

The reason I use the picture is from an old quote: “People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, ~but they will always remember how you made them feel.” I show the picture to prove the truth in the statement. I cannot reciprocate much about what I learned in eighth grade or a book I read while in the eighth grade but I can still name every student, and tell you how every student made me feel.  I can tell you how every student made every other student feel.

People will always remember how you made them feel. That statement is true about your colleagues, friends, relatives, and coworkers. Long after you leave an organization, your legacy is defined by how you made people feel and how people made you feel. What do you want your legacy to be?  

I ended up going to my eighth grade reunion. I saw those same faces, same smiles, and same feelings that I remember from eighth grade. And just to be clear, we didn’t talk about our eighth grade curriculum one time. It was great to see my old friends, and it was great to feel that happiness resonate off their faces. It certainly started up some new dialogue.

At the end of each year, I have an individual meeting with all of the employees and all of the students leaving our school. I ask each one how they did. One teacher told me that morale was low. She kind of caught me off guard. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that our organization was perfect. And I knew that I wasn’t complacent but nonetheless, I didn’t expect that response.

I guess you have to examine the source sometimes to decipher the statement. It didn’t matter because even though I estimated that it came from three people and it didn’t affect our positive culture, it was an opinion. I told the teacher to start with herself and move out. I’m still waiting for a response.

I later found out that with all the new initiatives mandated by the state, some people were feeling overwhelmed with their workload. Because my inbox is always full, I never took a look at that paradigm. Just because the stress does not come from a leadership view, you need to see things from many angles.

The colleague in question went to a leadership conference that summer with some colleagues. She came back with some new culture initiatives of her own and injected some positive energy upon her return.

What stands in your way?

I hope it’s not you. Motivate yourself, inspire others!

We are going to create a place where everyone wants to be through commitment, hard work, and leadership.

This is a fresh approach to any organization. Well, not really but it’s an approach that every organization should take. Most people are worried about productivity rather than process. If you fine-tune the quality of the process you’ll create long-term productivity. How much time do you spend at work? Even if it’s eight hours a day, that’s half of your waking time. If you create a place where you want to be, I guarantee it will be a place where others want to be as well.