A lot of people view self worth in a negative light.
We view someone who cares about themselves too much as self-indulgent, narcissistic, selfish, etc.
And, to be straight up with you, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. Positive self worth can turn into self-absorption.
But I like this old quote from who knows where:
Before you can love others, you must love yourself.
If you deal with multiple people in any capacity, you lead at least sometimes.
A lot of people also view leadership as a top down thing, or something that people get to do when they’ve proven themselves, or when they’ve fought for the right.
That’s also not true.
Sometimes leaders are there because there was no one better, or no one else recognized that some position needed leadership, or that they hadn’t proven themselves, but everyone around them was convinced that they did.
There are all kinds of leaders, good and bad.
I know I just said it, but everyone leads.
If you cook dinner, you decide what food goes out when.
If you are a parent, you help your children define their own lives.
If you are a driver in a car with other passengers, you are literally in control of their safety.
If you know the best way to the bathroom, you take control and lead or give directions when someone asks.
These acts seem trivial, but you cannot functionally lead any significant team without being able to do these tasks as well.
I can always tell when I’m at a restaurant where the staff is impatient with me for not placing my order the right way.
I can also tell when I’m getting amazing service.
I am not clairvoyant or psychic.
I worked food service for over 5 years and customer service for 2. I did my best, but did not always exceed.
I intimately know, and have watched other’s perform, the Dance of the Stupid Customer.
The stupid customer does not know what is on your menu even though you can recite it by memory.
The stupid customer can’t remember what they needed.
The stupid customer doesn’t know what price things are and needs to double check what they can afford.
The stupid customer doesn’t know where the bathroom is, even though the sign is right there.
The Dance of the Stupid Customer is a slow, twitchy dance, where you occasionally shift your hips from side to side, click your tongue, narrow your eyes, and cut the customer off mid sentence because you know exactly what they’re going to say next.
This is an example of where someone has the opportunity to lead. They have a great amount of experience, and the exact skillset to assist the customer with their need, but because they hate their job so much, they are extremely impatient, and their attitude inflicts pain on both themselves and the person they are supposed to be helping.
But, let’s be honest, some customers suck. A lot. And maybe your boss sucks too. And maybe the job sucks. In that kind of situation, it’s really hard to fault someone for being impatient. They don’t want to be there, and they have no real support for improvement.
I have been the customer, the employee, and the person watching from the sidelines. I fault no one for getting themselves stuck and not knowing how to get out. I fault no one for being inexperienced.
I think many people are much more capable of leadership than they’ve been lead on to believe.
I think a lot of people who have the capacity for great leadership have been told that they aren’t smart enough, vocal enough, driven enough, or some other assortment of things to ever be a real leader.
Great leadership takes great compassion.
Your team will fuck up every process all the way to Sunday, especially if they are untrained or the process is new.
But that is your team. You can start the employee hiring-and-firing churn to search for the ideal candidate, but I’ll bet there’s a reason they’re not already knocking at your front door.
It’s rare that a company gets to work on a very interesting problem, and also has the capital to pay handsomely.
It is more common that people are working jobs that they kind of enjoy, or have found some way to derive personal value from them. Look around you and ask “Who here is actually working in their dream job right now?”
If multiple people answer yes, you may be breathing rarefied air.
If you’re like the rest of us, that is a really important question.
There’s nothing wrong with an imperfect job. If anything, it’s human, and finding the humanity in yourself and others is going to be your biggest step towards effectively leading teams in any capacity.
People have emotions. They forget things. They get tired. They misspend their money. They have personality disorders or defects. The list goes on.
There is a growing area of business related psychology research that shows:
People perform at a higher capacity when they get rest
People perform more consistently when they get regular breaks every 90 minutes or so
People perform better when they are happy
Many personality issues come from a lack of perspective more often than malice.
I’m sure you could find a negative quality in your best employee. I’m sure you could find someone else who is better at that thing. I’m sure when you find that person, you could find a defect in them too.
But it’s hard to spend your time being compassionate when there’s work to be done, especially when no one is doing it right!
Time invested in others, if invested in properly supporting them, pays out.
Eventually, the support you provide to others becomes support they provide to each other.
This is not limited to social compassion.
If you can create a supportive environment where your employees are welcomed to take responsibility and express themselves without hypercritical judgement, you will find that they suddenly start coming up with solutions to all of those problems that no-one could solve.
It wasn’t that they were unsolvable problems.
It was that you didn’t have the right perspective, and didn’t trust the person who did.
It’s hard to trust other people when you don’t trust yourself…
…When you’re timing your own breaks, when you’re counting how many minutes late to work you are, when you’re self-flaggelating for every ounce of productivity you failed to squeeze out of yourself.
My advice?
Get some sleep. Work less tomorrow. Share your problems with someone you think may not have any valuable input, or someone who knows your problem well, but you are afraid to trust.
Good leadership starts with you, with a healthy foundation, and with trust.
