Leadership Elements

There are several leadership elements that are key to ensuring that you are either a successful leader or a failure as a leader.

As a leader you shouldn’t have the perspective that you know everything. You should be prudent to know that no one person knows everything so be humble to even say the dreaded words ‘I don’t know’. A smart way of navigating through something that you don’t know is to use your team effectively. How about having a brainstorming session where everyone has an opportunity to contribute. How about giving the group an assignment and see what they will come up with as you do your own research either through the professional or academic networks you may have. All these will enable you to save face or inspire confidence in the group that you are still the top guy and you have things under control even when deep down you know that you may be vulnerable. Since no one knows everything try and error should be encouraged and shouldn’t be frowned upon once you hit a dead end where your past experience can’t give you the way out. Hence the determination and the desire to beat the challenge should spur you to look for ways to solve your situation. Getting it wrong doesn’t mean failure, we can use that incident to learn and shape our future as thy say experience is a good teacher.

It doesn’t stop there. There has to be something else that will make it even better after getting it wrong. The humbleness to admit that you got it wrong is a big plus as a leader. The reason is that this creates the right attitude to learn and understand the correction and the reasons for doing the mistake. This has the effect of showing the team that you are also human and that they can be as productive hence increasing the team’s synergy. This attitude and approach has the benefit of bringing honest to the team such as when people have been assigned their respective roles but one may not know how they should go about it. They can easily ask for contribution from others on how to go about it thus saving time and energy that would have resulted in doing something wrong when it could have been avoided in the first place. Another advantage of getting it wrong and admitting that you got it wrong is that the person who may know how to do it right will be willing to show you how to go about it in a warm way with an intention of ensuring that by the time they are done explaining you are at par with their understanding of the subject matter.

No wonder Seth Godin said: Two elements of successful leadership are a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it. Seth Godin"

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