The Greatest Leadership Opportunity
Last week I was advocating that we think about how we could each do a little bit to put the global team and I still believe we need to continue to think about that. This week I want to get a lot closer to home.
I am a firm believer that the place any leader can make this biggest difference is in their own home. Many of the same things a leader must do for a team or organization also occur in a family, they just look a little bit different.
The Greatest Challenge
Probably the biggest challenge in leading at home is how much is at stake. I know that providing for our families and our overall career are absolutely critical. Without at least a certain amount of success, we will end up more concerned about putting food on the table versus truly leading our families. But think about just how much is at stake with a critical failure at home. With that type of failure, there may be no backup plan and it may be very difficult to mitigate any impact from a critical failure. And it isn't just a colleague or an organization you impact, but you are impacting the people that should matter the most in your life. It’s your spouse, kids, grandkids and generations in the future that could feel the effects of your failure. Just that thought alone puts a significant amount of weight on my shoulders. That also emphasizes just how critical it is to be deliberate in our family leadership.
The Flip Side
Even though critical failures are a definite possibly, they don’t have to be the norm. We are going to fail, but there are plenty of tools to help us manage the failures we do have and avoid critical failures. Even with the huge impact a critical failure may have, the rewards of leading, and even making mistakes, far outweigh the risk. The opportunity to help a young person learn, grow and reach for their true potential is the pinnacle of leadership. And where better to work together to that end than with our children.
In high school I had an opportunity to attend a leadership course and one of the speakers presented an amazing custom drawing to the person who had the most potential in the room. That was me for one very simple reason: I was the youngest person in the room. That's the way I see it with my kids today. They have so much more potential because of who they are, the world they live in and the opportunities I hope they have. While I can’t force them to reach their potential, I can certainly be proactive in helping them develop the skills they need to do so. Skills like confidence, self-awareness, decision making, critical thinking, curiosity and many others will be key to them reaching their full potential. I can be the kind of leader and parent that helps them develop those skills. At the very least, I can give them opportunities to do so.
There is No Such Thing as Perfection
Nowhere is that statement more true than in leading our families. As we help them reach for their true potential, we are going to make mistakes. Some of them may be gigantic and really take us or them off course. Sometimes we will do too much and other times not enough. We will miss key teaching opportunities. It’s just going to happen. But if we are being proactive, most of those mistakes won’t be failures and we will certainly avoid most, if not all critical failures. But the biggest mistake we could make its to not try. We see way too many families that just give up. That is the only critical failure that is irreparable. So even with all our mistakes, we just need get back up, learn from the last mistake and keep trying.
In my next post, I will talk about leading our families in this very challenging time. So give that some thought. How can I today positively impact my family and how can we as a family positively impact the world? As I mentioned last week, let's start small and go from there.