I’d like you to consider the following ideas which I have about leadership.

The leader is there to serve.
The leader has a major influence on the ‘emotional tone’ of a business and/or team.
The leader should consider each employee as a person, not a number.

The leader should strive to help others to be as good as they can be.
The leader should do the right thing.
The leader should understand that leadership is a privilege.
The leader must attend to their ego, and ensure that it is appropriately ‘dialled down’.

The leader must make sure that ethical behaviours are front and centre, and will go beyond these if the ethical behaviours fall short of the moral requirements of any given situation.
The leader is aligned to company values, but will move away from them if there is a clash between morality and some corporate value.

The leader will flex their approach, even if they feel vulnerable doing so.
The leader will allow others to lead when and where appropriate.

The leader must be emotionally intelligent.

If you agree with most or all of these statements, then it is highly likely that you will understand what I mean when I talk about ‘the gap’. This is the gap between what I consider to be a ‘common sense’ approach to leadership and how some leaders and businesses actually behave.

Sometimes the gap seems so huge that we can feel as if we are lone voices shouting about the injustice of it all in the wilderness, or we can even begin to doubt our sanity. However, you are not mad, you are simply observing behaviours that are often caused by (amongst other things) a combination of some or all of the following: habits, corruption, fear, delusion, greed, and stupidity.

We can make a difference. We can’t change everything, but we can change those elements in our lives and businesses that we are responsible for… and that would include ourselves.

Please try the following exercise. Have a really good think about the following areas in your life, and in particular as a leader (irrespective of role or company or current situation – you are still leading something!).

Grab a pen or pencil and some paper, and carefully consider each of the following questions before writing down your thoughts:

What do you actually value? What is truly important to you?

What drives you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

What do you want your reputation to be? How do you want to be seen by others?

What would you say were your key strengths? What strengths are you not using?

What behaviours are you displaying which may not be truly aligned with your values, drivers and desired reputation?

Be totally honest with yourself.

Any misalignment may mean that you are simply not being the change that you need to be to effect the changes around you that you want to see.

To use a simple example, if you value honesty, and creating an honest culture is one of your drivers, and you want to be viewed as an honest leader, but you know that your behaviours have been less than straightforward recently, then this lack of ‘congruence’ may well be massively limiting your progress and effectiveness. I would urge you to think about any possible misalignment, because by adjusting that, you are strengthening yourself and can therefore be much more effective in helping to close ‘the gap’.

And often, when we think about the strengths that we have that we aren’t using, and then access them more readily and regularly, we can really begin to fly.

Please look at those leadership ideas again and realise that they speak to you because they are you. We need to begin to make a bigger difference today.

Best wishes
Mike