Leadership Lesson #1

It wasn't pretty. As a new supervisor, I thought I knew what leadership was. After all, I had over 20 very productive years in IT. I had observed some good supervisors and some bad, and some very bad. Surely I had learned a lot from all that observation! Wrong.
We were having a team meeting and I had just finished a sentence that began with, "It can't take that long to..." when one of my team members exploded and started to leave the room. I had become a bad supervisor. I expand »wasn't listening to what my experts were telling me. I was assuming my strong technical background of the past had given me some kind of infallible wisdom for the future. This episode got my attention.
I suddenly realized that I needed help to learn how to lead people. John Maxwell, Ken Blanchard, Peter Drucker, Paul Glen, and Stephen Covey came to my rescue. The books these guys wrote were gold to me. They helped me understand what I was doing wrong and change my way of thinking. They helped me understand that leadership is more than knowledge, it is caring about people. Truly caring - not just paying lip service. As Maxwell is fond of saying, "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
I learned a valuable lesson that day. Strength and knowledge in one career field doesn't translate into strength and knowledge in another. Being an expert in one field of knowledge doesn't automatically make me an expert in another. My challenge to all leaders today is to assume you don't know everything and trust the wisdom of those that know what you don't know. That is a key to gaining trust between leaders and their teams.

Stuck In A Career You Don't Enjoy?

Louis L'Amour is my favorite writer of western novels. I read all of his books that were published before his death in the late 1980's. He lived a very interesting life that holds some lessons for us as well. Louis' family lost their home in ND after a bank failure. They moved from place to place, following the work that was available (like skinning cattle and baling hay), doing what was necessary to survive. Louis had little formal education.

When Louis was older he kept up the family tradition of moving from place to place, working wherever he could find work. One thing separated him from others in his situation though - he discovered public libraries. He read every moment he could and provided himself an education that his family had been unable to provide. Once he began writing, his life was forever changed.

If a poor migrant worker can educate himself using public libraries, and become amazingly successful in the process, what is preventing you from reaching your dream? Don't feel like you are "stuck" in a career that doesn't fit you. There are ample opportunities to attain your dream using resources that are readily available, and often even free. Wayne Gretzky once said, "You miss 100% of the shots you never take." Take your best shot.