Leadership - Be positive - be clever
Be positive - be clever
Business
If you wish to be recognised as being a leader you must be able to impress the managers above you as well as your team colleagues.
There are a few key points to remember.
- Don’t keep raising problems always bring solutions and opportunities to a meeting. See the glass half full rather than half empty.
Senior managers want to see the way forward they don’t want people to keep telling them that the project may not be feasible.
If you do raise a major issue make sure you have considered solutions and that you have the information to back up your concerns.
- When presented with new ideas and proposals look at the positive points, consider the benefits. What are the real opportunities.
Don’t look for negative aspects from the start.
- Volunteer.
Make sure you let it be known that you are available for a new challenge. People like others that are prepared to go the extra distance rather than hide away. It has another advantage. If you wait around trying to avoid projects you may find you end up with the one that no one wants.
- Exhibit loyalty. Don’t whinge about things. Learn to get on with things. It is all part of the rich tapestry of life, learn by experiences.
Try not to moan about colleagues and your boss, it is a recipe for eventual disaster.
- Always try to succeed. If you do and fail you will gain experience and you will gain points for at least making a positive effort. Make sure that you just don’t go ahead blindly with absolutely no consideration to the risks involved.
- Decision making should come from a positive viewpoint and not a negative one. If you have employed people you should assume that they are competent.
If you have cause to move someone to another position it should be ‘because their skills and experience are best employed elsewhere’ and not because they are ‘useless in the current position’.
Practice makes perfect
There is a very famous phrase that goes, ‘the harder I practice the luckier I get’ which was attributed to the golfer, Gary Player.
In the business world practice boils down to experience. You can’t gain experience without being involved and ‘having a go’.
The application of experience gives you a better chance of success in any decision making process. The more experience you possess the ‘luckier’ you may appear to be whereas in fact it is purely skill developed from knowledge and its application.
Don’t give up
When things are not going well it is very easy to give up. However, success may be just around the corner. One test of a leader is how they react to failures and set backs. Worrying, feeling negative and apportioning blame are poor signs. You need to approach disaster in a cool manner and look for solutions and options to indicate the way forward and not to ‘cry over spilt milk’. Leaders need an unerring belief that they will resolve all issues and eventually achieve success.
In Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘IF’ there are the lines.
And treat those two impostors just the same;
…And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
…Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my Son!
Persistence and perseverance are good traits to develop.
Seek and you shall find
Leaders find the correct path or the right decision because they are looking for it. You can’t achieve success without effort.
Many people will consider another person lucky if they are rewarded from a particular endeavour. They ‘just happened to be in the right place at the right time’ or ‘everything fell into place for them’. The truth is that a leader looks for the opportunities from any situation and examines ways to make things happen.