We recently (April 7) held a PowerRoundtable event in partnership with Leadership Insight on the above topic. My own view is that the majority of what you learn about leadership you don’t learn in school!
Our panelists – Ron Close (Executive Entrepreneur in Residence at Ivey and MaRS), Chris Carder (President of ThinData) and Kathy Rethy (CEO, KAR Developments) – laid out a variety of opinions and observations… all interesting. You can check out the recap here.
My big take away though came from Ron Close. I had asked him what was something he knew about leadership now that he didn’t know when he started. His message was that, to lead you have to really and truly know yourself… know what you’re about, what you believe, what’s important to you.
From that place of knowledge, leadership becomes easy. You become more “at peace” with your decisions and have a real clarity about why you need to make the calls you need to make. I found this interesting. It made lots of sense… certainly, you’d be a lot less stressed out about most decisions if you felt that they were fully and completely aligned with your values. However, I didn’t think it was as easy as Ron made it sound. I’ve met too many leaders that are trapped in a shell of leadership. Their “insides” don’t correspond with their “outsides”.
How do people get past that? And the fear that goes along with it? After all… looking in the mirror to discover what you’re really all about isn’t something that everyone wants to do.
What do you think? Is leading from your most authentic place easy to achieve and do you think most organizations can handle your leadership truth?
