Leadership Is Actually Quite Simple...

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Leadership Is Actually Quite Simple... "Leadership? Simple! Inspire and unite your team with your vision and charisma; then expedite goal attainment while minimizing conflict." - Douglas Castle The only tools that you require (and you can get them at almost any hardware store or delicatessen) are these: 1. A vision, and the ability to communicate it to others (and sometimes to refresh their memories) so that it is highly visible and "comes to life" in their hearts as well as in their heads. 2. The ability to demonstrate how the achievement of your vision benefits each and all of the members of the team, and how each team member will be making an important and emotionally-satisfying contribution for the benefit of all. 3. The ability to draw a plan which includes input from each member as well as a vital role to be played on the part of each member. In the planning process, you must serve as a moderator and a mediator (while maintaining focus and intensity) so that the plan produced will be the product of every team member's work. 4. The energy to drive the entire team toward the objective, and to consistently keep them on course even when they are fatigued, distracted or disillusioned, or while they are in conflict with the team or with individual members within the team. 5. The wisdom of King Solomon to make decisions which resolve conflicts without creating lasting bitterness, the inclination toward sabotage of the objective, and which minimize ongoing rivalries or enmity between any two parties, or between any one member and the entire group. You must be a warrior, a vigilant observer of subtle shifts in mood and momentum, and you must be perceived as a fair and reasonable judge and resolver of disputes. Good luck to all of my friends and colleagues who aspire to be great leaders. Being a great leader requires more sensitivity, skill and balance than walking a greased, gossamer-thin tightrope without a net underneath you. You may be a hero, but you may be hated just as easily. You will be judged not only on your ability to get the team to the objective -- you will be judged on every decision that you make along the incremental process to goal attainment. You will be terribly lonely. You will feel infinitely responsible, but you will always be the ultimate source of blame. It will age you, and it will stretch you beyond any limits which you thought you had - and then stretch you further, until you fit the challenge. The rewards will ultimately be quiet and introspective - you will have the knowledge, deep within you, of knowing that you lead the charge to achieve something that chnaged the world, or some aspect of it, for the better of the people for whom you felt responsible. Leaders are necessary, but being in a position of leadership is an appalling responsibility for a mortal. My only advice to you is this: Do not be a leader unless something needs to be done and you are consumed by the desire to get it done. It is a calling and a compulsion, much more than an opportunity or a social or business position. On occasion, I have thought of leadership as a punishment or exercise necessary in order for you, as a person, to evolve into somone or something better. Faithfully, Douglas Castle Chairman and Director of Strategic Planning TNNWC Group, LLC ---------------- Douglas Castle - THE DAILY BURST OF BRILLIANCE .001 http://aboutdouglascastle.blogspot.com/ http://takingcommand.blogspot.com/ http://www.douglascastleblogosphere.com/ TAKING COMMAND! - http://takingcommand.blogspot.com/