A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Brené Brown
The essence of effective leadership
Every human reacts and responds differently to situations. That’s why we occasionally act negatively without meaning to do so. These different reactions often affect us at work, for instance, how we choose goals and deadlines and how we go about our workday.
Few leaders set realistic deadlines for their team members, often motivated by a need to get something done quickly or personal ambitions.
But the main problem is that the team doesn’t know about any of that; they simply see the deadline and how difficult it is to achieve and then see a poor leader who can’t be pleased.
It’s also possible that setting these deadlines might be something a person does out of fear or worry that their leadership skills are lacking.
⚡️Courage pushes an excellent leader to succeed. Believe in yourself; fear will not help!
A team should have a shared understanding of all required work, achieved through effective communication. For example, the leadership team working with Dr. Brené Brown decided that each person needed to take notes during meetings and work together on estimating deadlines. Doing this allowed them to communicate effectively and see where others needed help.
Binary thinking patterns often surface in organizations and are dangerous because they do not maximize employees’ full potential. Examples of such binary thinking include:
- Operations versus marketing
- Finance versus creative
- Spenders versus savers
- The heart versus analytics
- The dreamer versus the stick-in-the-muds
Tagging people with stereotypes or just one quality limits their ability to explore and expand. But people are capable of different things, and this summary shows how that knowledge can be helpful to you. The following sections will help clarify the different types of leadership and how you can stand out.