Why leadership is about making others better?

Why leadership is not only about personal achievement, not about climbing the corporate ladder, not a way of showing how significant or important you are, not showing who can talk and not showing who has the right to give orders and the right to make decisions?

Leadership mindset

Leadership mindset is about finding the purpose for the leadership work and readiness to serve, help others to find fulfilment in their work so that they would be ready and willing to go also beyond their normal roles, eg. by:

Taking up special assignments
Dedicating time and effort to volunteer campaigns
Contribute and help others
A person gets a sense of purpose and significance, which is aligned with their personal value

When a leader raises standards in their own leadership style and attitude, generate trust and ambition, leads by example and is a role model for others, it will be sure that this impact and attitude will last within the team while leader is absent.

To make a real impact and to create a basis for team cooperation and development, leader needs to understand what are those intrinsic values for each individual employee that motivates and inspires them at work. Any leader or manager needs also to know and recognize their personal skills and ambitions at work.

Leader needs to find out and appreciate employee’s wishes about the tasks they enjoy or wish to conquer and pay attention to their future development opportunities. Those employees that want to grow, but are not challenged enough, will sooner or later go and find an employer who will give them enough challenges.

Leadership styles close to my heart

I could say that there are may leadership styles than can be combined in my way of thinking about this, but in the end my heart seems to be closest to the servant and coaching leadership style. It seems to be that this style is both somewhat challenging and perhaps even the most authentic way of leading.

There are many authentic leadership attributes, personal characteristics and learnable skills linked to servant and coaching leadership style.

Servant and coaching leadership is a mindset of helping others to grow and develop, generating more overall awareness, raising the team’s capability to grow beyond their own egos moving from self-centric goals to willingness and ambition to work together utilizing everyone’s capabilities and potential.

it is willingness to increase the level of self-leadership, ownership and responsibility. It is the way of appreciating the people working in your team. It is patience and the ability to tolerate uncertainty and change, it is a tolerance of one’s own and others’ incompleteness, it’s the ability and honesty and vulnerability to admit one’s own mistakes.

It is the openness to other people’s ideas, thoughts, and needs. It is openness for the feedback and for trying new things. It is the confidence on the ability to figuring new things out.

It is moving from blaming others to full commitment to one’s own thoughts and emotions and actions, it is serving others and being a role model, it is willingness to guide and mentor the team members, it is committing to stay inspired on a daily basis and be an inspiration for others.

It is owning the leader’s identity, noticing the persons you work with, understanding people, caring for them, giving to them, it is showing persistence to show up at work as your best self, even on a bad day. It is the capability of making difficult decisions when needed, it is the capability of saying no, it is the capability of not being liked by all and be fully ok with that.

Making world a better place

When we have leaders truly owning this type of thinking and behaviors, lifting other people up around us, I see that it is one of the most ambitious, challenging and most rewarding way of making world a better place – not only at workplaces, because the influence of this type of leaders extends much further and wider than that.

I can easily admit that when I was offered my first official lead-position about 7 years ago, I was far away of understanding all the dimensions of leadership and management, but was willing to step into challenge, appreciating the position of the utmost trust, responsibilities and opportunities to learn.