Today's
quotation:
Leadership
is not magnetic personality; that can just as well be a glib
tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people;"
that is flattery. Leadership is
lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a
person's performance
to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond
its normal limitations.
Peter
F. Drucker
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Today's
Meditation:
We seem to be getting very warped ideas about
leadership these days, especially in the political
arena. People in leadership positions seem to be
more and more often motivated by personal gain and power
than they are in actual leadership; we see so-called
"leaders" who make decisions based on who will
profit from them rather than on whether or not they're
good for the people they're "leading."
If I'm a leader (and I am, in several different contexts),
my responsibility is not to tell people what to do in
order to have control over them, but to help them to find
the right directions in their own decisions. And in
doing that, it's important that I help them to become
better at what they do. My expectations need to be
high but realistic; demanding but achievable. I
don't want students who take my classes to plan on an easy
semester, and if I set my standards high, I know that
they'll know the topic much better at the end of the
semester than they did at the beginning.
Certain people want leaders to be easy, because then
nothing difficult is asked of them. There are
students who make sure to sign up for another teacher's
class because they know they won't have to work as hard
during the semester; but I know that they also won't know
nearly as much when the semester is over. I tell my
students constantly that it doesn't matter to me if
they're my friends or not--what matters is whether they
learn.
As leaders, our decisions always should be made based on
what's best for the people we're leading, not on what's
best for us. Sometimes that makes things difficult
for us, but that's part of being a leader--there will
always be difficulties, and I'd much rather take on a
difficulty that will be beneficial for others than choose
a path of ease that's not going to benefit anyone other
than myself.
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