The Leadership Coaching Blog

I’ve been re-reading an article from People Management magazine which was basically posing the question - “Given the general hunger for good Leadership, why are leaders in such short supply?” The writers (Rob Goffe and Gareth Jones) put forward 2 main reasons:

1. Organisations desire leaders but structure themselves in ways that kill leadership - they encourage conformists or role players with little sense of who they are and what they stand for.
2. People’s understanding of leadership is blinkered - they focus on the characteristics of leaders and what they do to others, rather than seeing it as something they do ‘with others.’

What I believe they are saying here is that leadership should always be viewed as a relationship between the leader and the led. That there is no set recipe to follow, and that attempting to imitate other successful leaders is doomed to fail - this is because what will work for one leader will not necessarily work for another.

In many ways I agree with this - as aspiring leaders need to discover what it is about themselves that they can mobilise in a leadership context, and not purely rely on trying to ‘do’ what others do.

On the other hand, I do think that this can be a useful way of testing your effectiveness as a leader and coming to terms with your true self - in terms of what feels comfortable and natural, and what feels forced.

Anyway, there was more to this article than I have time to get down here, so will try to come back to it shortly

If you have too many ideas or thoughts and don’t know which to concentrate on….. 

If you’re worried you might make the wrong decision…. 

Stop worrying and start taking action.

• Pick one idea and see it through to the end. 
• Take small actions and persist to get momentum, and the bigger results will come!

So what are you worrying about?  What are you anxious about?  What have you been putting off doing something about?

• What action can you take today to get you started?