Everyone can be a leader.
The qualifying questions are:
- Are you willing to do the work necessary and step up to be one? Or,
- Are you waiting until someone taps you on the shoulder to begin? (Hint, it may be a long wait!)
What Does It Take?
Make a commitment. Many people say they want to achieve certain goals in their lives, yet, do not take the focused action steps necessary. For example, they wish to participate in a networking group or on a team project, but fail to show up and contribute.
- Review your values and goals.
- Are they consistent? For example, if you have a goal of becoming a millionaire, yet, everyday spend money for lunch, coffee and other items your actions do not support your goal.
- Make the necessary changes one step at a time. Take one item that you are spending money on and instead invest that money.
Use qualified assessments. These tools provide incredible accuracy and insight into your leadership traits. They also provide objective awareness of how to better communicate, manage and work with others. The challenge is there’s a lot of mischief over what defines a qualified assessment. The bottom line is that a qualified assessment complies with the Department of Labor guidelines for pre-employment use. These tools have significantly higher reliability and validity, and predictive validity, than the other 3,000 tools available in the market today.
- Select a qualified assessment and a qualified coach. (www.SeibCo.com/contact)
- Review the results with your coach.
- Together with your coach put together a project that will help you improve one area. (Hint: putting together a project to listen better will yield poor results. Instead, put together a customer service goal that will require you to listen in order to achieve that goal.)
Be coachable. Behind every leader is a trusted advisor/coach. (Think, Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, etc.) Also, leaders usually have an industry mentor to help them stay current in their profession and industry. You need to have both to excel as a great leader. The right coach encourages you to do what you need to do, but don’t want to do, to achieve unprecedented results.
- Select and hire a coach.
- Select an industry mentor and ask him or her to be your mentor.
- Put together a 13-week project and goal with your coach and share it with your mentor.
- Do the work required to make it happen.
- Blast through those barriers that normally stop you.
Take one day at a time. Every human being has personal baggage. In order to be a great leader, we need to unload it, be responsible for our perceptions of the incident, and have acceptance that the situation happened. Take the time now to get it resolved, one day at a time. It doesn’t get easier as time goes by – it gets harder. Failure to do so, may have you miss out on promotions or coveted opportunities, or, even become unemployed. If necessary, find a licensed therapist to get down to reality and better understand yourself.
Pick yourself up after a failure. Don’t berate yourself for mistakes or failures. Pretending you don’t have any, or are unable to apologize makes others uncomfortable following your leadership. Every great leader has made more than one mistake! The key is, they picked themselves up and resolved it. Now, not later when may be too late.
Everyone has what it takes to be a leader. The million dollar question is, are you willing to do the work to become one?
©Jeannette Seibly, 2016
Jeannette Seibly has been working with leaders as an international business advisor, executive coach and management consultant for over 23 years. Along the way, she guided the creation of three millionaires. Her trademark is her uncanny ability to help business professionals identify roadblocks and help them blast through those barriers to produce unprecedented results. Contact her for a free, confidential conversation on how to get the results you want: www.SeibCo.com/contact