By Steve Moran
I started an article this morning on being misunderstood, and what showed up on the page was this fundamental idea that leadership is hard. It is mostly hard for two reasons: You have to be relentless in your pursuit of being a great leader, and it is complicated, meaning there are lots of moving parts.
Moving Parts
Every single person in your organization is a moving part, and each of those moving parts is complex. They have different skills and personalities, needs, and quirks. They are motivated by different things and demotivated by other things.
This means the bigger your organization, the more moving parts there are and the more complexity there is.
Beautiful Music
As a leader, you need to figure this all out in a way that takes advantage of the very best parts of each of these moving parts — and, at the same time, covers in other ways the things those machines don’t do so well.
And then you have to make sure their emotional needs are met every day all the time.
It’s Simple
What I just wrote sounds, at least to me, impossibly complex, to the point of making my head explode, but it turns out that it is profoundly simple. It all comes together like magic when leaders spend their days asking this one question:
How do I make the lives of those people who are a part of my organization better?
And when leaders are really getting it right, they are asking how they can make those lives better both at work and at home.
There is one more thing in the simpleness, and that is that things will go wrong. You will get things wrong, you will be misunderstood, people will betray you and your organization. None of that means you should give up or change your way of serving your team.
It Is Hard
Because of all this — that at times feels like it is in conflict — it is hard because it is never-ending, yet when you get in the groove, when it becomes a habit, it will actually make leadership better and more joyful than you could ever imagine.
It will be hard and feel easy.
