Linked In Leadership: An Exchange with Will Pearce

Today we discuss the question how do you develop yourself as a leader with Will Pearce. Will is an executive and management consultant from North Carolina. I enjoyed discussing this question with Will and was pleased that he follows the bloggers code of offering valuable resources as part of the conversation. You may notice I added a link on the blog roll to PeopleFit, this is a resource site that Will likes. I checked it out and found some good articles that you may want to look at yourself. Also he put me on to a blog by an IT guy who talks about management, Keep the Joint Running. I have to be honest most of the IT guys I have met cannot manage their way through a staff meeting let alone really managing. But this site is different this guy gets it. I will be reading his blog and I think you should as well.

Enough with the preliminaries…

Will took my question to a different place. I was asking about tangible actions that people take to improve their leadership ability. Will talked to me about mindset.

I focused more on the attitude necessary to develop as a leader than I did on the mechanisms or resources for development. I suspect that the reason that most people don’t reach their leadership potential is that they don’t want to take the risk of change (forgetting that without change there can’t be any growth). I should point out that many people will risk a little bit, but that only a few are willing to become so completely open and vulnerable as is necessary for reaching one’s full potential.

So there is a time to play it safe and a time to take risks. Will is right leaders take calculated risks and in doing so open themselves up to growth. It is interesting that tomorrow I will post another article written more from the influence of a manager on this point of risk…

We have to decide that today we will not play it safe, there is a decision that needs to be made an action completed and the outcome is uncertain. What is certain is that they are watching and choosing not to act would be worse than acting and going in the wrong direction.

Will offers three pieces of advice in positioning yourself for development as a leader.

1) Consistently seek self-awareness

2) Relentlessly seek objective criticism

3) Periodically seek greater challenges

No to do list, no easy three step guide to leadership effectiveness. No here we have three key points that when followed authentically will position you for greater levels of leadership success.

Each of these topics has been featured her on Develop a leader dot com as key aspects of leadership training and development. You must know yourself, you must embrace feedback from others and you must challenge yourself. Great advice well worth pursuing.

Lead well

Ron