Missing leadership qualities
I’ve been musing on Leadership lately, specifically Positive Leadership, and I’ve come up with my personal short-list of leadership qualities I find in short supply these days.
Honesty
Whether it’s employee appraisals or what happened to the stock price, honesty seems to be missing from many of our leaders these days. And I’m not talking about the “if I just don’t tell them is it really lying?” kind of honesty. I’m talking about blunt, hard-edged, “give it to me straight since it’s the right thing to do” kind of honesty.
How many of you know someone that got a good if not great employee appraisal year after year then gets let go out of the blue? No conversations with their manager, no agendas for improvement and no trips to HR? Just… let go. Certainly every business has a right to perform their HR function however they see fit within the boundaries of the law, but doesn’t it seem to make a lot more sense to try to heal the wound than simply cut off your hand?
I’ve had this conversation with many of my personal and professional contacts, and a fair number of us think one of the main reasons situations aren’t handled with more honesty is tied to the next quality on my short-list.
Comfort with Dis-Comfort
As much as we all say we’re committed to the “hard conversation”, the fact is that many of us, leaders included, don’t look forward to those conversations and come up with any number of rationalizations to avoid them.
I’ve found that leaders are generally pretty good with discomfort until it becomes personal. While it may be uncomfortable, even gut-wrenching to direct HR to cut 10% of the workforce, often it’s harder to call a direct report into your office and tell them they aren’t performing and are getting let go for cause.
Selflessness
Last but not least on my short-list of missing positive leadership qualities is selflessness. We only have to look as far as Enron and the recent financial collapse to find catastrophic examples of what happens when greed and self-interest take hold. Too many bad things happen when we are insecure and selfish (and all those other bad habits). Only when we lose ourselves and focus on something greater, and more positive, do we start truly leading. I can’t offer any scientific arguments, only the wisdom of a recent thread of thinking amongst some friends on Facebook that went something like “you can only give to the world what you’ve taken care of inside yourself.”
For more eloquent thinking on this quality you might enjoy Leading Blog’s post on “The new golden rule“, or Next Level blog’s article on “Leadership advice from an investment analyst.”
How about you, readers? What leadership qualities do you find missing these days?
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