I’m documenting some of the leadership rules I’ve collected over time on this web site. I certainly haven’t “invented” any of these rules, but I have gathered these ideas and concepts from ideas shared and situations experienced with coworkers, friends, and other wonderfully wise people over the years.
What’s the point of publishing these rules? After all, many of these are obvious, and most are based on common sense principles. There isn’t anything novel or unique in these rules that might change the discipline of leadership studies. So, why write these?
1) We leaders tend to let our egos get in the way, and we need reminders to keep us in check. When we overestimate our charisma, we think we can skip or shortcut some of the common sense steps to leadership, but this almost always gets us in trouble.
2) We need reminders of these fundamentals, especially when other pressures occupy our attention. As managers and leaders, we should commit to regular refresher studies in leadership for the same reasons that we hold refresher classes on safety procedures and ethics rules. We may not have the luxury of stopping and thinking when we need to draw on these rules, so we want these to be second nature to us.
3) We frequently over-complicate leadership. Most organizations frequently introduce “new” projects, processes, or organizational frameworks, and too often, the new vocabularies and methodologies necessary for the new imperatives complicate our workload and distract us from the fundamentals. Occasionally, we are the ones promoting and instigating the latest management technique (dare I say “fad?”) on our organizations, overlooking the basic tenet that people are still people no matter what new buzzwords we introduce.