I strongly believe that good leaders must have two (02) qualities. Empathy & compassion but unfortunately these things are often forgotten.
One 100% of customers, clients, vendors, and employees are people. No matter how good your product, services, marketing, and design is, if you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.
We are social animals. We are human beings and our survival depends on our ability to form trusting relationships. That is how God has created us.
Leaders are so concerned about their position in the organization that they actually forget their real job and the real job of all leaders is to take care of the people, who actually take care of the customers, and I don’t think people realize this or even trained on this.
When we are juniors, our only responsibility is to be good at our jobs and some people go & get advanced education, companies provide lots of training to teach us how to do our jobs well. And those people, who consistently work hard and achieve targets and milestones got promoted.
And we become responsible for the people, who do the job, which once we were doing but nobody teaches us how to do it and that is why we become managers but not leaders.
All we have to do is to go through transition. Take over the people, who are responsible for the job, and then they become responsible for the people, who do the job.
What is lacking in many organizations is that they don’t teach people, how to lead. They only teach how to manage.
Leadership is a skill like any other. It is a practicable, learnable skill and this is something you really need to work on like body muscles when you go to the gym.
All of us have the capacity to be a leader but it doesn’t mean everyone should be a leader or want to be a leader become it comes with great responsibilities and sacrifices.
Always remember, you are not in-charge, you are responsible for those, who are in your charge. When things get right you have to give away all the credit and when things go wrong you have to take all the responsibility and blame.
I often meet and talk to many executives and senior managers during our business global meetings. I used to ask them, what is your priority and most of them say, our priority is our customers. In my opinion, it is not true. Our priority as leaders is our people, who are responsible for those people, who are responsible for the job to satisfy the customers.
Some leaders or rather managers are often criticizing their team members. “We don’t have the right people, my team doesn’t know, how to work, we have to replace them” etc. but the reality is that it is not the people, it’s the leader, who needs to improve, if we create the right work environment, we will get the people to work right.
When there is a performance issue, why our instinct says you are out. Because we do not practice empathy and compassion. Don’t say how to get the most out of the people, you as a leader should always say, how to help my people be at their natural best.
You as a leader should practice empathy and compassion and relate it with the people around you and it will profoundly change the decision we make and the world around us.
In the end, I would like to ask you, do you prefer to be with a good manager or a true leader? The choice is yours!