Are you really a leader?

Leader: “The person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country.“

Most of the people when they switch organisation or even start handling multiple departments, they make their first priority to find what’s wrong and focus on changing everything as per what they have in mind.

I have come across so many people who come with assumption, everything at new place is wrong, processes are broken and I will be the one to ensure everything falls in place.

You may ask, what is wrong in the above statement? The purpose of getting someone new is to either improve current processes or fix broken things. Well, that’s true but the only thing wrong in above statement is the assumption.

Assumption is our worst enemy. We are known to take worst decisions which are either based on assumptions or are emotionally driven.

But we all are running in a race to impress either our seniors or peers, we really want to create an impression of being the only torchbearer around.

To be frank, I was no different. When I joined my current organisation, I was in the same situation, I felt, we have wrong set of people who can’t even have one click deployment, there are no processes around, I will have to clean up the mess and what not.

Well, most of the things were even true but there were strong reasons behind certain actions which I got to know when I started understanding people, understanding their reasons behind certain actions etc..

That gave me good clarity of everything and helped me to focus on the path for the next few months.

So how did this happen? I just took a pause and realised that I am thinking from just one side. I started thinking from the other side, focused on why and that’s when I started getting clarity.

The job of a leader is to first understand people, understand why certain processes are different than their expectations, work with them, help them to walk the path you have drawn for them and smoothly handle the change process.

As a leader, our job is not limited to finding faults and changing everything to what makes us comfortable. We have to focus on what is best for the department / organisation, keeping our ego and differences aside.

Make your team understand the path you are drawing for them, get constant feedback, learn from them, grow them, grow yourself and finally, walk with them.

The job of a leader is to show the path, walk with them, then let them take the lead and you take a backseat.

Photo by Eric Heininger on Unsplash