Today on Instagram our topic of the day was Leadership.
Good leaders never lay blame.
It is never someone else’s responsibility that the team lost, or the result wasn’t good. Leaders are accountable. Leaders are also humble, and more likely to give credit to teammates than accept credit themselves.
…Incidentally, these are excellent things to keep in mind during post game media interviews….
In honor of Dr Suess’s Birthday here’s a suessical look at leadership…
Leadership is the ability to evaluate a situation, recognize you have the ability to respond or react and make a decision about what to do based on your own feelings, not those of the group. You be the guy who decides where to go….
Lets talk about Integrity
Leaders with integrity consistently conduct themselves with high ethical standards regardless of who is watching. If no one is watching them, they behave the same as if everyone was watching. Leaders with integrity don’t try to see what they can get away with.
Here’s an example from my time in college. I remember this vividly, because the lesson will stay with me. we had a lousy weekend of games, I don’t remember the circumstances or the reasons, but I do remember what happened next. Coach was mad….really mad, and as a result we had to run…on our day off. Coach wasn’t allowed to be there (the NCAA limits organized practice time), but we were told to meet at the football stadium, and run around the outside perimeter of the stadium about a million times.
The actual number of stadium laps isn’t important. What is important is that part way through, we were tired and as a group we all started to talk ourselves out of finishing the job. “coach isn’t here, she’ll never know…”
In that moment, we were out of integrity with ourselves, our team and our coach. We lacked leadership.
What we needed to understand is that it doesn’t matter how bad it is, or how hard it is, or how tired you feel. At the end of the day, you are on a team, and you have to get the job done together regardless of the outcome. Not all games go your way, not all games are easy, some games are a struggle to get through, sometimes the job is just. not. fun. But, no matter how tough the circumstance, as a team you need to get through together. Every team needs a leader with integrity to be the person that pulls everyone along when things are hard.
That day at the stadium, all it would have taken was one person to stand up and say, I’m going to keep running. I’m going to keep running, and everyone would have followed. In that hard game, all it takes is one person giving their all, getting tired, bloody and sacrificing their body for people to look around and think to themselves, look how hard she’s playing…I have more in my tank. I have more to give. That one leader with integrity giving their all no matter how many people are, or are not, watching will bring up the level of an entire team.
The next day at practice we came clean, admitted to coach that we hadn’t finished the run….and we finished the run. We restored our integrity and got the job done. I’m pretty confident that every single athlete on that team will remember that moment, and understand the value of integrity.
Other qualities of good leadership:
* Honesty,
* Accountable
* Giving Credit away
* Taking Blame
* Communication,
* Confidence,
* Positive attitude,
* Commitment,
* Intuition,
* Inspiration/motivation,
* Integrity
What do you think? did I miss something? What are some other traits of good leaders?
Leave your thoughts in the comments.