Leadership, it's kind of a BIG deal!

 

    Leadership is a practicable, learnable skill. Everyone can be a leader, but this doesn’t mean that everyone should or wants to be a leader. Leadership takes a lot of sacrifices, you sacrifice your time and knowledge, and when things go right, you sacrifice the WIN. You make sure that the people who made the WIN happen gets the credit for their work. A leader makes the people their priority, not the customer or the business. Leaders create an environment where their employees can be themselves and thrive at their job. Where they can make a mistake without the fear of reprimand. Now, by no means am I saying not to hold them accountable for a mistake. But accountability can have many faces. They can be accountable because you caught the mistake and now you, as the leader, must make sure they know what was done wrong and how not to make the mistake again. This allows them to learn to look for those mistakes and catch them before they can. Not because they fear you, but because they want you to be proud of them for not making the mistakes. This is when you transition from a manager of people to a leader. This happened because you didn’t find the mistake and do it yourself, then reprimand the employee because they messed up. This is because you teach your team to look for errors and the knowledge of how to correct them. This also creates a culture in your business to look at the end goal and grow each other. A lot of companies nowadays are still in an archaic culture of autocratic leadership, where an individual controls all decisions and requires little input from group members. This style leads to employees who lie, hide, and fake. They lie to cover up any mistakes they made, they hide in the office and do not want to take on extra responsibilities, and they fake when they need training but are too afraid to ask. This leads to high retention because leadership has little care to take control over the people and teach, train, and care about them, as humans.

We as leaders need to change the way we look at leadership. We must take care of the people who take care of our customers. We need to ask questions when performance fails, we need to practice empathy, and find out what and why. Don’t jump to conclusions!

Leadership is not about being the best, Leadership is about making everyone else better.