Leadership starts within and goes beyond everyone…

Having a one-on-one with your boss can result in many things. Mine resulted in pushing me to write a blog post on what being a leader is!

“Leaders are not born” is a famous quote and true to that, one cannot be born as a leader. One cannot even be made a leader if the leadership doesn’t start within them. Being a leader doesn’t actually mean that you have to be the head of the clan. Any person who can show how to lead and not just guide on what has to be done goes down as a good leader.

Criticism

When do you discover that you the makings of a good leader? It starts when people start criticizing your actions. You don’t take any of that criticism to heart - you process the criticism in your brain and see what you can gain from it. You uncover your weaknesses when you analyse those critical comments. When you learn to do that, you become your own leader. Leading your life upgrades you to the next level and gives you an additional power to explore leadership beyond yourself.

Accepting

Not all become great leaders. The next step, learning to accept failure and figuring out what could be the next step, is where most of us fail. While handling a project, there will be a lot of failed attempts - but they are just attempts and not the end of the world. A leader will look into what the next step is going to be to push further.

Admitting your flaw

Sometimes going over to someone and confessing your failure or confessing that you are losing your grip over things, can help. They may either help in finding a solution or when you hear your own words, you will get clarity yourself. Losing your grip is common, but admitting it and looking for help is also a leadership quality. If you don’t realize that you’re in a mess and figure a way out with somebody’s help, how can you help others out of their mess?

Taking the stick doesn’t help all the time

I realized this very recently. Being a leader if you keep going for the stick, thinking it will get things done, then the stick is the leader and not you. It differs with the people you deal with. When something has to be done, instead of getting it out of them by standing on top of them, show them that it will not be as good as when they do it. This has two positive effects on people. One, they understand their importance of doing the task and two, they feel guilty that the work is not good enough. A good leader will understand this and thank you Karthik, for teaching me this great lesson.

Being an amateur in leadership, I am still applying these in the way I lead. I will followup with another blog post in the future, called the ‘Version 2’, with more newly learnt leadership hacks. Until then learn and lead from Version 1! 😉

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