Leadership is hard.
At least, it is if you’re doing it right: being a responsible, ethical leader who cares for the team and achieves goals.
Leadership is complex. There are many moving parts: individual personalities, unexpected situations, fast-moving decisions, and deep political waters.
Leadership is risky. There are countless opportunities to make mistakes: with your team, with problems, with choices, with political landmines.
Which means leadership is often scary. There’s a reason for the growing trend of people not wanting to be promoted.
Leadership requires critical thinking skills – which, sadly and to our detriment in so many ways, are neglected in schools, even in university and grad school. Nonetheless, as a leader you need to learn how to evaluate fact versus fiction and make decisions based on reality, not on subjectivity or emotion.
That said, leadership requires empathy and compassion as well as impartiality and logic. Developing people – a key factor in good leadership – means understanding their professional goals, how they learn, and how to deliver coaching and feedback they can hear and absorb.
And leadership requires self-awareness. Before you can understand others, you have to understand yourself. You need to know your blind spots, your irrational tendencies (we all have them!), and what’s likely to push you off kilter and into bad decisions.
With all of that, leadership is deeply rewarding. Seeing your people accomplish more than they thought they could. Bringing complex projects to fruition. Reaching targets, achieving goals, mastering challenges, solving problems – and, yes, recovering from mistakes.
Leadership isn’t for everyone.
And that’s okay. It shouldn’t be for everyone. We need the individual contributors, the team members, or leaders would have no one to lead. The leader and the team member are equally important, equally valuable, and have different, but equally relevant, skill sets.
If you want to be a leader, go for it.
But there should be no value judgment if you don’t. Excellence is achievable either way.
NOTES:
Photo credit: lumaxart, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons