The act and practice of leadership is a risky undertaking. Leadership is the act or bringing about positive change. This requires leaders to initiate, to blaze new trails, to venture into the unknown and unexplored terrain. All of this entails risk. Kouzes and Posner in their bestselling book, “The Leadership Challenge” describes it this way:
“Leaders are pioneers – people who are willing to step out into the unknown. They are people who are willing to take risks, to innovate and experiment in order to find new an better ways of doing things.”
Leaders take these risk because they have a vision, they see a future and a new world that inspires action and makes the risk worthwhile. Leaders are pioneers… not settlers. Great leaders take risk. They push past the edge of their current reality. Striving to bring their vision into today. How about you?
- Are you a pioneer or a settler?
- Are you taking the necessary risks to find better ways of doing things?
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Risk, Pioneer
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yes, leaders take risk. But I found in the research for my new book, The Leap, that the most successful among us are great risk mitigators, not risk takers. Similarly, the greatest leaders are the ones who can stretch the most without taking the greatest risk.
And there are numerous strategies to mitigate risk.
Rick Smith
Leaders essentially live in the future. The main challenge budding leaders encounter is the need to be ‘uncomfortable’ to others, break up old existing structures in companies and push individuals with vested interests out of their comfort zones.
The most important single piece of advise a leader can be given is:
a. surround yourself with mature friends/mentors who offer excellent advise and have a detached view of your vision
b. start the transformation process in your team/company
c. your leadership style, your leadership ideas and the very essence of the fact that you are there to create change will automatically trigger politics, re-action and backroom dealing
d. stay the course, stay the course, stay the course… avoid listening to the ‘good advise’ of ‘well meaning’ older team members whose only agenda may be to maintain the status quo intact.
e. every 5-10 days check in with your experienced leadership mentors and describe to them exactly what leadership strategy and tactics you have planned and executed during the last 5-10 days and how the team has reacted to these changes. Your mentors will be able to give you a detached view on how to manage the unavoidable politics of change leadership.This allows you to go back to the team Monday morning and continue your course of action with a fresh/clear mind
The seduction of being a ‘nice leader’ is tremendous, but leadership is not an act of popularity at times, it is the deep decision to guide people to a better future, even at the price of having to stay the course against the majority opinion of the settlers who live in the past. As one of the best leaders said: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. (Winston Churchill)
It really depends on what the risks are. Many leaders risk the interests of others in which case everyone can be a risk taker.