Do more, demand more
Power was out today at the home office, so I grabbed a book to read while I waited for it to come back on. The topic of “leadership” came up, and I read this doozy: Two critical traits of leadership: Always be willing to do more than you ask of those that follow you. Always demand more from yourself than any other person would dare ask of you.
The word “leadership” seems to evoke a type of corporate machismo among professional males. Everyone fancies themselves a leader of some sort, but how many are real leaders? I’m personally as far from a “natural” leader as you can imagine. I was painfully shy to the point of being flat out awkward well into my 20’s. Only through dedicated effort and some “funny now but embarrassing then” type of situations have I developed something along the lines of what some might consider to be leadership.
The two traits I mentioned earlier are great. I’m probably going to make a print out of some sort for my office when I return to the U.S. next week. But it’s barely half of the story when it comes to leadership in my book. Doing more than you ask of others; demanding more of yourself than others expect of you. That’s solid leadership in the realm of GSD – getting stuff done. But who determines what stuff gets done in the first place? When I was in the Army, lots of stuff got done, but it was basically the office equivalent of moving one pile of rocks from one part of the parking lot to another.
The word “leadership” is essentially the gospel in the Army, but I came to realize there were more people who occupied positions of leadership than there were real, honest to goodness leaders in those roles. The military gets a lot of good press for teaching leadership, discipline and such, and to a certain extent it does.
But I encountered very few if any true leaders during my days in the military. A leader in my book is someone who inspires a vision of what’s possible, beyond what is currently thought possible, and then empowers those following him with the resources, moral courage, inspiration and motivation to accomplish said vision.
Among brigades of career bureaucrats who are “sticking it out until retirement,” it’s no surprise such individuals were scarce. I don’t mean to unfairly bash the military. The same could probably be true of any number of professions or vocations; that’s just the experience from which I have to draw. And it’s why I decided while I was exiting the military I would do everything I could to not work a “real job” ever again. So far it’s worked out, but you never really know. People’s priorities and perspectives change over time; who am I to say what will happen in the coming years?
Well, Sana and I were stuck in the apartment, sweating like pigs waiting for the A/C to come back on, so we recorded an episode of our podcast Ba Vojdaan on this very topic. If you’d like to hear more of my thoughts, as well as Sana’s always poignant commentary, just press play on the player at the top of this page.