If Leadership is a Lonely Place, You’re Doing It Wrong
Knowing Self-Aware Leadership
I often see the meme ‘leadership is a lonely place’ and have to bite my lip. Or sit on my keyboard-ready hands. ‘In what context might leadership be lonely?’, is the question I always ask myself, and usually come back to the same answer…
“If you’re a leader of people and you’re feeling lonely,
you’re just doing it wrong.”
The days of leaders boxing themselves in to ivory pigeon holes in the penthouse of the shiny glass coup are thankfully behind us - or at least for those who’ve smelt the coffee that’s been brewing for the last 5 years. Leadership is no longer about the cult of leader and no longer symbolised by the hero at the top of the pyramid. Today, leadership isn’t about knowing all of the things and making all of the decisions.
Leadership is about inclusion, nurturing, empowering and delegating. The activity and practice of leadership mean taking an anti-loneliness approach to leading and inviting people in, or better still, inviting yourself over to theirs. Leading is now about being the sheep-dog that takes care of those in their charge not the wolf-pack leader that takes charge of those in their care. To be a an effective leader you must surround ourself with your people and your stakeholders, because you can’t be a leader in an empty room. That’s just self-mastery.
If a leader’s behaviour perpetuates strategic level disconnect from organisational- and stakeholder-others, they’re missing an essential element of modern day leader effectiveness: inclusive decision making. When you don’t include others in pinning down problems, solution ideation and formulating implementation strategies, you’re doomed to feel loneliness and an incredible pressure to be the thinker, option appraiser and decision maker.
And the workforce of today simply won’t stand for it either. They want inclusion at every level and those that aren’t included are quietly slipping out the door and quitting the outdated notions of those looking backward in favour of those looking forward.
A lonely leader is an exclusive leader, leading an organisation to obsolescence. Be an inclusive leader that leads from the front with vision and leads from the back with self-awareness.
If you’re finding that leadership is a lonely place, you’re simply doing it wrong.
Looking forward to having you on my learning journey!
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Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a Director in a Children’s Charity.
Surprisingly you are one of the few that talks about what true leadership is and not the “corporate” version which sees power hungry a-holes ordering ppl around.
I am thinking I don’t recall last time I read a piece on leadership like yours that properly addressed inspirational leadership like this
The literature speaks of “servant leadership” a lot but that is still full of “i order ppl around but sometimes do stuff for them”
Nice work