Leadership is as simple as growing up.
Or as difficult…
Leaders act like adults – not like children..
Some poor leadership behaviors are just childish behaviors, so growing up is part of your leadership development.
How?
For one thing, as a child you know what you want & just try to get it. You want to eat, to sleep, to play, to talk, to climb, to be consoled.
Life is simple when you want simple things.
Young children mostly get what they want.
Part of growing up is learning to choose between different things you want. Discovering that you can’t always have what you want.
Coping with conflicting wants.
Discovering that there are things you need to do that aren’t what you want. You need to wait, wake up, listen, sit still, help others, go to school, because you want to be comfortable or be accepted or succeed.
Balancing what you want so you can achieve something else you want.
As a leader you know that some things you want (like growing sales, engaging the team, getting new customers, reducing costs, making good products, providing better service) actually conflict with other things you want. (like growing sales, engaging the team, getting new customers, reducing costs, making good products, providing better service).
Life is complicated and the world pushes back.
Adults see things they want that prevent them getting other outcomes they want.
Adults and leaders balance competing wants by knowing what’s needed.
You want to be healthy and you also want to relax.
To get healthy you need to exercise, which isn’t relaxing.
Whether you get healthy depends on how you balance Exercise with Relaxation
You want to lose weight and you have a craving to eat ice cream.
To lose weight you have to eat less ice cream.
Whether you lose weight depends on how you balance your craving with eating less ice cream.
As a leader you don’t just have to convince yourself to exercise, or eat less, or whatever, you have to convince your team.
That’s hard enough if they all want the same things, but even harder if they all want different things.
Even harder if you don’t know what your own competing wants are.
Just telling people what you want isn’t enough. That’s what children do.
Or treating people as if they think the same way you do.
That’s what children do.
As an adult you see the things you want that prevent you getting an outcome you want.
As a leader you see the same things in your team, and help them to balance competing wants. Help them to be adults.
Hard to do if you’re not an adult yourself.
“..leaders balance competing wants by knowing what’s needed…”
Are there outcomes you want that are proving difficult to achieve?
Are there some other things that could be conflicting wants? For some of your team? For you personally?
How are you balancing them?
Are you balancing them or hoping they’ll fix themselves?
Are you the adult in the room?
.
.
“I might be wrong, but at least I’ve thought about it…”