Leadership is difficult.
You are surrounded by people (those you manage and those who manage you) who want to tell you how to do your job. And then you have all those people out there producing content to teach you how to be a leader using this model or that model. And make sure you keep up on the latest and greatest in your industry. Slacker.
To survive, leaders go into lockdown mode and use what the “know” will work. They form opinions – both about themselves and others – and use those opinions to make decisions.
Stop it.
Lockdown mode will help you survive the short-term. And will make you irrelevant in the long-term.
I’m at the 2014 Annual SHRM conference in Orlando, surrounded by HR leaders who are either here to reinforce their lockdown mode…or find ways to break out of it.
It’s hard to break out. It’s icky feeling. It’s scary. It’s filled with the unknown.
And it’s awesome.
I am here to challenge all of you to start looking at things in different ways. Expose yourself to people who think the opposite of how you think. Listen to a speaker you disagree with…and then find value in something that speaker says.
Employees can’t learn from a person who won’t entertain a different point of view, and leaders cannot grow if they surround themselves only with like-minded people.
Seek out the different. Expose yourself to it. You may not agree with it, but you WILL learn from it.
“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire
Surviving Leadership 