When it comes to leadership, what is it that attracts you to it?
Is it the title?
The dividends?
The power?
The idea that someone is a “natural born leader” is an advertising moniker.
It’s an easy quip for pundits to pull out of their bag of low-hanging fruits.
What it comes down to is simple.
Do you know what the others around you are doing?
Do you know how it all works?
You may have the title.
You may even have a fancy car.
But if you don’t know what’s going on around you…or what it is you are asking others around you to do…
Then you’re not a leader.
You’re just in the way.
There should be a phrase for that.
Or is there?
No one is above the work.
We don’t have kings or queens we answer to anymore.
There aren’t excuses for not getting it done.
No one, not one of us, is supreme.
We work.
We make mistakes.
We learn.
Sometimes we get it right.
What makes you a leader isn’t that you’re perfect.
It isn’t that you have all the flashy things.
It’s that you show up.
Time and time again, even when it’s not going well.
You know what you’re asking those around you to do, even if you haven’t done it yourself.
More importantly, you know what it is your asking from each individual.
For most of us, the work doesn’t stop with us.
Some semblance of it existed before we go there, and it will continue after we are gone.
If you don’t think that’s true, you’re not being honest with yourself…and you haven’t been a good steward of the foundation you stand on.
Whether we like it or not, the universe does not revolve around us.
Neither does the work we do.