On Leadership
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under thought innovatoin Sunday Jul 6, 2008
Update: I’m now a featured author at Brazen Careerist! Pop over there to take a look!
I’ve never really given much thought to leadership. I guess it’s because I’ve never really had to lead anyone before. Most of my academic career was all about me getting me through the next exam, or completing the next paper. Recently though I have started to think about it. I now lead a team in my work, and the concept of leadership has started to hover around the edges of my mind, and is starting to press itself into my thoughts. This is mostly because I suspect I’m not a very good leader. Most of the time I’m struggling with the work I have to do myself and I feel I have little bandwidth left to guide others in their own tasks. The trouble is, as new members join my team I know they are looking for me for guidance, and though I try my best to help them out and get them started on what they have to do, I’m beginning to feel there must be more to my role than offering technical help. I suspect this is where leadership begins.
Self Leadership
Since I’ve been thinking about leadership I’ve realised a few things, the first of which is that I’ve been wrong to think I’ve never had to lead before. Although my academic career was largely a solo effort, I realise now that all the pushing and cajoling of myself through the workload of a 4 year PhD was in fact all about leadership - Self leadership. Indeed, it is also clear to me now that without self leadership there can be no leadership in the wider, more commonly used sense. If you can’t convince yourself to see through a project to the bitter end, then how on earth are you going to convince others to do the same?
Commitments and Trust
What then is self leadership? I’ve been thinking about this a lot and for me, self leadership appears to be about self trust and making and keeping commitments. Making commitments to yourself and seeing them through is the only way you can be sure that you are to be trusted. Every time you fail on a commitment you make to yourself, it gets registered in your mind and you know with just a little more certainty that you are not to be trusted. As you lose trust in yourself, you start to make less and less commitments (after all, what’s the point), and soon you will begin to just go with the flow. You will let others make your decisions for you and your life will stop being something you create but will become something others create for you.
The trick then is to begin making commitments to yourself and to make damn sure you keep them. I think it’s probably best here to start small. I was about to also write that it’s probably better to start with meaningful things - commitments that motivate you. But actually, the lesson I am learning here is not that I can achieve meaningful things, but that once I make a commitment to myself I will follow through on that - no matter what it is. This also means that I had better be sure I can stick to the commitments I do make. In which case, I should be extremely careful about the things I do commit to, since I now begin to realise what the cost is (to my sense of trust in myself) if I renege on it.
Another thing I have realised is that I don’t appear to be making many commitments to myself, unfortunately this isn’t because I’m being super careful about what I commit to, but rather because I don’t actually trust myself very much to stick to them. However, as I mentioned, this has largely gone unnoticed until now since I have rarely, if ever, thought about leadership before. But now is seems pretty clear.
Leading Others
It seems to me also that by making and keeping commitments to yourself, the sense of trust you will build up that you are someone who can see things through, will then enable you to inspire and convince others to follow you on your projects. Once you are sure you are a person who can stick with it, you will have a much easier time convincing others that what you are proposing is do-able. This is where true leadership must reside; being the kind of person who can suggest embarking on a new course of action, a new route or a new venture, and have others buy into that proposal and be willing to join you on the journey. Their willingness to join you is because they are inspired by your vision and they trust you to make it a reality. However no-one is going to follow a person who can’t trust themselves to finish what they start - building up that initial trust in yourself has to be where leadership begins. I’ve got a long way to go, but now at least I feel like I know where to start - with myself.
I think it was the Success Principles by Jack Canfield that said, “You’ve got to be able to keep commitments to yourself before you can make commitments to others.”
Welcome to the BC community! I’m looking forward to hearing some more of your thoughts.