Category: Leadership & Influence Page 14 of 20
New-Paradigm leadership begins with personal responsibility and combines vision, commitment, relationships, communication, compassion, courage, decisiveness, integrity, organization, strength, and the ability to influence and inspire others.
Leadership in the knowledge economy is vastly different from leadership in the information, industrial and agrarian economies. In the old economies, dictatorship, domination, command and control where the prevalent models. It is easy to lead through domination. Hold a gun (or a paycheck) to a person’s head and you can get them to do almost anything; however, when you take the gun (or paycheck) away – you no longer have the ability to get them to do what you want. And chances are, they will pay you back for forcing them to do something they may not have wanted to do without the gun (or paycheck.)
I was going through
my travel photographs and saw this picture of a poster at the Dubai Airport advertising the world’s tallest building, which was under construction at the time. The Burj Dubai is very impressive and I was inspired to write more about the towers of glass.
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“The key to a leader’s impact is sincerity. Before he can inspire with emotion he must be swayed by it himself. Before he can move their tears his own must flow. To convince them he must himself believe.”
– Winston Churchill
There are a lot of things that can cause a leader to fail. None of them are as deadly as what they do to themselves! The following is a list of saboteurs that apply equally to leaders and followers:
- fear, doubt & disbelief
- criticism (and the inner-critic)
- anger (under-expressed & over-expressed)
- invalidating behavior & communication (most of us are so used to this, we don’t even notice it)
- triggers, reactions & moods (we all know people who react to small things and are moody)
- greed & jealousy (yikes)
- black holes, denial and the emotional roller coaster (no matter how much you give, it is never enough)
Who wants to follow a leader who is afraid, doubts the task at hand is possible and disbelieves the team’s ability to get the job done? On the other hand, who wants to lead people like that? The truth is no one in their right mind would “want to.” However, the reality is that as a leader, we end up having to lead people exactly like that!
The key is to learn how to succeed as a leader regardless of the quality or state of the people we are leading.
In future posts we will discuss in more detail how to handle difficult people…
“You gotta have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, then how you gonna have your dream come true?”
– Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, “Happy Talk,” South Pacific, 1958.