Mark Shead - Leadership501

Many inexperienced leaders fail to adequately communicate a vision to the people they lead. If you don’t tell everyone which direction to head, you’ll have confusion. For some leaders, their deficiency comes not from a lack of communication, but from not having a vision, themselves.

Leadership is an important trait, but sometimes people get so caught up in trying to become better leaders that they forget to spend anytime figuring out where it is they want to lead. It is much easier to lead if you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and your ideas are good.

In fact, a poor leader with a great vision will accomplish more than a great leader with no clue where they want to go. Success covers a multitude of failures. If you are successful, people will tend to overlook many mistakes you make as a leader. If you are unsuccessful, people are less likely to overlook your deficiencies in vision.

If you are driving people toward shared success, they will tend to stick with you because they are succeeding. In some cases, they may even start copying some of your poor leadership habits thinking they are part of the reason for your success.

This is the same type of latitude we give to geniuses. If you take a look at a photo of Einstein and think what your reaction would be meeting someone who looked like him in almost any social setting, you probably wouldn’t automatically have much respect for him simply based on his appearance. However, since he was successful, people overlook his appearance. I imagine there were even some younger physicists who stopped combing their hair with the idea that mimicking his (bad) habits would help them achieve success as well.

Obviously, leadership skills are very important. It is much better to lead with a solid vision and tremendous leadership acumen. Just make sure that as you develop your leadership skills, you don’t overlook the skills that will let you develop a vision worth following.

Most people assume that large organizations are well led. Some people assume that any successful business has good leadership. Leadership is interesting because it isn’t particularly easy to pass on to someone else. Because of this, there are many businesses that are successful (they haven’t gone bankrupt) that aren’t particularly well led. Many times an organization will rely on the success of its previous leader who has been gone for years.

Great leadership is a very rare thing. For most people, it isn’t something that comes naturally. What is amazing is that so many organizations are very successful with only marginally competent leaders. Sometimes, this is because the structure of an organization helps make up for the leader’s shortcomings. Sometimes, inadequate leaders are able to succeed because their support staff specifically makes up for their weaknesses.

While great leadership skills will help make someone successful, don’t assume that being successful indicates that someone is a good leader. This is a trap that many people fall into when they are looking for someone else to emulate. They find someone successful and assume that following their example will make them a better leader. Obviously, if you are mimicking good solid leadership skills, this might be a good thing, but many people can’t tell the difference between a skill that leads to success and a bad habit that someone succeeds in spite of.

When you stop assuming that successful people got that way because of their leadership skills, you are in a much better position to truly observe the strengths and weaknesses of others. Don’t assume that every habit of a successful person is a strength and don’t assume that every habit of an unsuccessful person is a weakness.

My dad teaches at a community college. He has some students in his class who don’t have to take tests like everyone else. They take their tests with a special proctor who reads the test to them. This is so they don’t get confused by reading it themselves. I’m not joking. The idea is that they might be at a disadvantage if they have to read it by themselves.

I feel sorry for these individuals because they have never been allowed to fail. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I don’t think you should be able to get a high school degree if you are incapable of taking a simple multiple choice test without help.

Our educational system is set up to keep people from failing. But failure is an important part of growth. It is sad to see someone who should have experienced failure in 2nd or 3rd grade making it all the way to college. When they enter the workforce, they are going to fail terribly once their employer discovers that they can’t read.

Make failures learning experiences, but don’t gloss over or ignore them. You need to recognize failures to build a strong team, but you also need to recognize failure to help people grow as individuals.