November 04, 2020
1 Leadership Thought
Things never go according to plan.
No matter how many hours, meetings, spreadsheets, and emails you spend on making a good and thorough plan, something always happens to change it up:
Somebody gets sick or gets in a car accident and things get delayed.
Somebody makes a mistake and the team is struggling because of it.
The client decides to go in a different direction and you have to adjust on the fly.
The most important quality in a leader that will carry the team forward is the ability to produce hope.
Hope is more important to breakthroughs than any plan, speech, or goal.
With hope:
We learn from past mistakes instead of regretting them.
We move forward in present circumstances instead of grumbling about them.
We persevere towards future goals instead of wandering aimlessly.
With hope we can write new chapters. (Share this on Twitter)
Here are two essential keys to being a leader that can produce hope:
Remember your own mistakes: You’ll never be a servant leader if you believe yourself infallible where others mess up.
Don't be a savior: Because you also make mistakes, you'll inevitably fail others. Don't make yourself the one they find hope in. Instead, point them to hope that never fails.
1 Resource
Brian Robinson on empathy in the workplace:
“Empathy isn’t endorsing poor job performance or even agreeing with the person in question. It’s simply suspending temporarily your point of view and walking in that person’s shoes for a brief time. It takes you out of gridlock from your own perspective and lets you see a situation from a colleague’s vantage point without agreement. And it helps you respond to job issues with less judgment and animosity and more maturity, objectivity, fairness and equability.”
Source: Forbes: Workplace Empathy Packs a Punch
1 Question
How did a role model help you become better than you once were?