Perfecting Your Leadership: Your Nature Still Needs Nurture

Try as we might our leadership practices are never perfect for long. That Is because our situation changes with changing circumstances. What worked in a company of ten no longer works for a company of fifty or two-hundred and fifty or two thousand. Change is good as the opposite of change can be stagnation, a rut, and a lack of progress or innovation. Even if things seem to be working well, the status quo is not our friend for long. That means, as leaders, we must constantly provide inspiration, renewed purpose, and new challenges that motivate the team. Ideally, we leverage past success to create new opportunities. This growth requires us to adapt and often expand our leadership skills to fit the changing needs of our expanding responsibilities and our organization.

Many well-established leaders start with a propensity to take the lead; the desire to lead or step up and take responsibility comes naturally. They are natural-born leaders and they can hardly imagine acting any other way. Others take on a leadership role more reluctantly and grow into it as they recognize that achieving what they are personally and professionally passionate about will require them to guide others. All people who have or develop the desire to lead have leadership potential within them even if the starting point may differ. What is common to both paths is that to be an exemplary leader takes work.

Ironically, there may be a disadvantage to being a natural-born leader as the realization that there are ways to improve their leadership can be slow in coming, if ever, as they can often achieve with a seat-of-the-pants approach for quite some time. It happens in the sci-tech fields as our careers focus on the immense amount of learning and technical training needed in our type of business. If some of us get exposure to leadership training, it is usually much later, too generalized and watered down. For a sci-tech environment, the rah-rah generalities of leadership can seem too vague or soft and thus nice to have but not critical to achieving success in a data-driven environment.

However, more knowledge of leadership practices and some benchmarking from other industries can cause an epiphany. Once the realization that some problems are of our making hits, we can often look back and realize how many of the struggles endured on the journey could have been avoided or dealt with more efficiently with better practical knowledge of leadership and some guidance and support. That seat-of-the-pants leadership long relied on becomes a kick in the pants.

For many years my colleagues and I felt we were achieving despite the circumstances; that we were leading our teams as best we could thanks in part to our natural leadership. What we didn’t realize, or admit to, was that we had a part in creating those circumstances. Could we have corrected every circumstance or everyone’s negative impact? No. But could we have avoided some painful bumps in the road and thus achieved more? Absolutely. Could some of us who relied on experience and self-study for our program strategy have avoided career-limiting decisions? Yes. Could we have found more enjoyment in our lives during it all? Most assuredly. Could our company have benefited from us being more knowledgeable, savvy leaders? Yes. To their credit, a senior colleague and our boss did promote learning to develop our business acumen however, leadership was a small part of that learning.

In concluding their classic text, The Leadership Challenge, How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, https://amzn.to/3JfB5o5 , James Kouzes, and Barry Posner explain what it takes to be an exemplary leader; they stress that achieving exemplary leadership is possible for all those who truly desire it and that achieving anything less is “not due to the lack of natural gifts.” However, they found that while sustained training and effort are prerequisites, not everyone wants to learn, and not everyone who learns will master it.

Mastering exemplary leadership requires the following:

? A strong belief that you can learn/grow

? An “intense aspiration” to excel

? Devotion to deliberate practice

? Determination to keep challenging oneself

and

? Engaging the support of others

So, when things change or start to go sideways, remember that the quality and consistency of your leadership is always up to you. What should you do?

To find answers and engage my support, here is how to contact me:

https://www.parenteaubc.com/contact.htm