Who do you consider to be a leader worth admiring? By admire I mean that you are so impressed by them (vision, accomplishments, style, etc) that you celebrate them, become their fan and would like to adopt some of their behaviours into your life.
So... Gandhi? Hitler? Churchill? Your neighbourhood businessman? A preacher / priest? A film actor? A family member? A friend? Well, that's your choice.
Now, consider this Ted Talk by Martin Gutmann (the trigger for this short article) that tries to understand this by asking if, by actually celebrating the wrong leaders, we are thereby creating an aspiration to become what might actually be an ineffective leader? If so, what could be the repercussions (on self / team / organization / society) when we celebrate the only shiny (media / social media) side of leadership?
There's a lot of food for thought in this video. For me, one of the most provoking ideas was about what are the measures by which we tend to judge leaders. Or rather, which measures are most appropriate to evaluate leaders?
This further reminded me of discussions I have had during my corporate days while hiring candidates at any level or promoting employees. Practically everyone at the discussion had a different criterion preference when evaluating the person, and it would frequently take us time to understand the other person's perspective when we didn't understand and disagreed with the evaluation.
Things moved forward only when we shared our perspective on the factors we looked at when evaluating the candidate.
And the two final thoughts that struck me from this video:
- Is there a leader authentic enough to be worth admiring, particularly when we look at the current behaviours of some of the world's politicians and business leaders?
- How do I leverage my strengths to become a leader authentic enough to be admired?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
