Value In Every Role

I closed last time by mentioning the various lists detailing positive leadership qualities from a simple internet search… I found one from PositivePsychology.com called Positive Leadership: 30 Must-Have Traits and Skills. Whew! That’s a bunch… Quite honestly, I almost skipped it altogether. The idea of learning 30 of anything is a bit daunting but with leadership already requiring so much from us, it may as well have been 3,000! That said, the article did a fair job of segmenting the 30 so it wasn’t quite as overwhelming as the title suggested…

The list of five that I found from Abilene Christian University was a bit easier to digest. Truthfully, the four that Gallup picked were even closer to something I felt like most leaders could add to their current workload (not specifically those four, just the idea of focusing on only four…). But I think we can simplify it even more!

Here’s the part I found most interesting: there was almost no overlap in any of the lists I read through. And I don’t have a huge issue with that. As much as I hate to admit it, I can't tear off my dress shirt to reveal a giant S on my t-shirt (you know, for Superman…). I’ve had to come to terms with the idea that I cannot be all things to all people, and I really don’t want to! As leaders, we need to accept that we just won’t be great at everything our organizations need. To that end, even our organizations won’t be great at everything. When it comes right down to it, we’ll need to identify which positive leadership qualities we can do better than anyone else and make sure that’s exactly what we’re doing!

A friend responded to the last post by sharing how she never expected her team members to do something that she wasn’t willing to do herself. While that can be tough at times, especially when the whole reason we have team members in certain roles is because we don’t have time to do everything ourselves, I believe that really boils down to humility. In all the years I was responsible for orientation with new employees, regardless of the organization signing the check at the time, I hammered the point that no one in the company was better than anyone else. We all had a job to do and everyone should be shown respect. Whether it was emptying the trash, negotiating with a vendor, making sure we had enough on staff, or overseeing the whole shooting match, the job mattered! Otherwise, we shouldn’t have someone in the role. And while each of those required a different level of skill, that should have no bearing on the value of the individual.

When we’re willing to exemplify humility in every aspect of our leadership role, we show that we value our team members just as much (or even more) for who they are as we do for what they do in the organization. As we maintain that standard for all the leaders on our team, we’ll soon start seeing the lasting impact that only positive leadership can have - with our team members, as well as with the people in their lives.

Next time we’ll dig into a positive leadership quality that’s so important, we would rarely do business with someone who hasn’t earned it!