You, Leadership And This Blog

Long weekends often lead to interesting conversations as happened to me.

A long time reader and I were talking and he asked where I thought leadership belonged. He said he understood and agreed with my premise that claiming leadership was only for a select few and that selecting them when very young was both wrong and wasteful.

What use then were leadership skills? Did I believe that they, too, were worthless twaddle? Did I have anything useful to offer in their place?

I read back on what I’ve written and I realized that things I thought I’d made clear were more like mud.

I decided that he’s right, if I want to tear up and root out leadership myths, then I need to offer something in their stead and discuss what to do in detail.

Leadership, like charity, begins at home; moreover, it begins with the one person with whom you always have, and always will, live—yourself.

It doesn’t matter what you do or where you do it, if you don’t acquire strong leadership skills and apply them to your own actions, then you set yourself up to follow blindly, lacking the knowledge or discretion to choose your leaders wisely and to look after yourself.

I doubt that’s an attractive scenario to you and it certainly isn’t one that I want to encourage.

So some of what we’ll talk about over the next few weeks is how you can apply useful leadership skills to your own situation; more about how your unique MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) impacts them; how and why it’s important to tweak them to fit your MAP.

I invite you to weigh in, agree or disagree and to ask whatever questions will enable you to put it all to use.

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: flickr