Leadership aspirations comprise sharing challenges, brainstorming solutions, having open feedback, and relying on collective intelligence. No leadership is complete without empowering your team. Empowering starts with building trust between you and team members while pursuing collective team goals. While there may be many paths to leadership, they’re certainly not all created equal and don’t amount to adding water and mix recipe for leadership. What constitutes a leader is the biggest question of all time. Real leaders perform and get results – they always get the job done no matter what the circumstances are – they consistently exceed the management’s expectations. The ends don’t justify the means as one may win a few battles, but they’ll lose the war. Pure optics over compromised ethics never ends well any day. Service beyond self is the hallmark of true leadership. A good leader needs to be caring beyond oneself and leading others to a much better place compared to where their leadership journey started. Often, this is not what drives all leaders. Rhetoric can not be above actions as leading is delivering the vision. If a team can’t do something, then guide them how they can. Helping people reach their true potential they didn’t know they could is a sign of an accomplished leader. Sticking always with some status quo is the main enemy of leadership as understanding the need for change to deliver on your promises is the key. Becoming a talent magnet and not a talent repellent who can’t acquire, develop, or retain talent is really detrimental to most successful leaders. Seeking to shine the spotlight on others instead of yourself and using “I” when accepting responsibility for failures or using “we” when referring to success goes far and beyond the call of leading with examples. Placing things above the people one leads is a tell-tale sign of a failing leader. All this explains why you’re not a capable leader. If a leader in you haven’t been recognized as such, either you may have a wrong self-assessment problem, or someone doesn’t recognize your talent. No need to be disappointed as one may still have some work to do on developing their leadership skills.

Simple is not what I want to do: Go to those places that inspire your curiosity