One of my favorite questions asked during our Meet the Founders activity is, “What is your advice to aspiring leaders?”
Most of us, if not all, have a leader we look up to. Those leaders’ qualities can vary from being visionary, assertive and charismatic to authentic, compassionate and resilient. And because those leaders have been successful in their own right, we mistakenly associate success with their personalities.
I answered the question with two points.
Number 1, an aspiring leader should know his/her strengths and bank on it. Leaders need to understand and manage themselves in order to lead.
“The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk.” – Quiet by Susan Cain
For instance, if you are an introvert and structured leader, do not force yourself to have daily spontaneous discussions or small talk with your team, else that would burn you out and will reflect on how you deal with your people. Instead, provide a venue where you can communicate with them on a scheduled basis to make sure that your emotional bank is full. On the other hand, if you’re fun loving and creative, stop pretending to be formal and strict. Maintaining your non-negotiable is enough for the team to know the boundaries.
Number 2, leadership is service not the other way around. Best description for me is The Man in the Arena by Theodore Roosevelt;
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
As a leader, you have to be less of a critic and more of a doer. It is your responsibility to find and know your people, understand the battle you are leading and go through that battle with your team.
Since our Meet the Founder activity has time constraint, I made sure to discuss these points focusing on the mindset instead of the implementation. Leadership is a continuous process of learning and unlearning and I am a work in progress myself. After reading a lot of leadership books and going through my own experiences, a discussion on how to be an effective leader deserves a book of its own.
