The second of a 6-Part Series on Servant Leadership
In our last article we discussed that leadership, in it’s simplest form, is influence – nothing more, nothing less. So, if leadership is nothing more than one person influencing another person, then that means everyone is a leader. Right? During the course of any given day, virtually everyone influences someone else in some way. And don’t forget, you have to influence yourself first before you can influence someone else.
When I first started to realize this, it caused me to take a closer look at the various ways I was influencing people throughout the day. Truth be told, I was embarrassed by the inconsistency of the ripples I was creating. In general, I was typically on my best behavior at work. Beyond that I found that I was creating a mixture of good, as well as, less than ideal ripples. What embarrassed me most was how impatient I typically was with my family when I got home from work. This was happening way too often.
This increased awareness got me thinking about the importance of being more intentional about how I was impacting and influencing people throughout my day. I realized that I had a responsibility to take ownership for my actions and how they impacted others. This realization helped me see the importance of leaving others with a positive feeling; a feeling of increase.
My new awareness continued to increase over time. It made me realize that I needed to always take complete and full responsibility for myself. I had to stop playing the “blame game.” As I started to take more ownership of myself, I realized that I could also start to expect the same from my team at work, and my family at home. Over time, the positive impact of this change was significant.
As we increasingly became more responsible individually, it opened the door for us to trust each other more and more. This allowed us to become more cooperative and collaborative, which improved our effectiveness and our productivity. And the beauty of it all is that we became more accountable, which led to dramatically better results.
Take some time over the next few days to reflect on how much responsibility you are taking for your actions. If you find that you are playing the “blame game’ more than you realized, that’s okay. It is a starting point that we can work from.
This is the second segment of Anavo’s 6-part series on Servant Leadership. You can find all of our articles here on the blog.