The price that leaders pay

Leadership comes at great personal cost, and a career in leadership should not be entered into lightly. Let me explain.

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- As a leader, you will be constantly putting out fires.
- Eventually you realize that you need to mentor other leaders to put out fires for you, then it does get easier.
- But in reality, you are always thinking about the next fire: where will it come from, will there be any warning signs, and will you and your team be able to deal with it?
- As a leader, your peace of mind will be gone.
- That is the main price that a leader pays, in my opinion.
- Typically, success is distributed amongst your team, but failure aggregates to you.
- Even if people are friendly to your face, they will criticize your shortcomings behind your back.
- Your team will do this more than anyone, because they are victims of your decisions!
- In many ways, it is a thankless role.
- The high points for me are seeing a team succeed that you helped to form, and seeing new leaders grow that you helped to mentor.
- It’s weird, but you are always identifying and training your successor!
- Recently in my company, HR even emailed me to ask me to nominate a successor. Not for any specific reason, it’s just their process to have a candidate on file to take over from you if you quit, get fired, or get hit by a comet.
- You are always one bad failure away from being replaced.
- In such a situation, how does one maintain peace of mind?
- For me, Stoicism has helped me to develop a mindset of accepting those events I cannot control, but to instead control how I react to them.
- It takes experience to admit that we are not in control of events, and on occasion they can conspire against us, to no fault of our own.
- A bad reaction can make a bad situation ten times worse, however.
- Secondly, in recent years I have started to study karate again.
- I got to an intermediate level in my twenties, then quit when life got busy between my career and family.
- Now in my forties, I am returning to training with my sons in tow.
- Martial arts is excellent for also reminding you that you are not in control but must react quickly and effectively during training to take control.
- The exertion of influence is a form of force: in my day job I need to force a topic through, while in the dojo I need to force my training partner to the floor.
- Influence is force.
- It is cause and effect, and you as the leader need to be the cause.
- Someone is acting, and someone is reacting: leaders need to act, and when forced to react, do so calmly but with targeted force.
- Leadership is not for everyone: you need thick skin to deal with the criticism, insight to see problems coming before everyone else, and be a student of human nature to ensure you can get the most out of your team.
- You also need to embrace the chaos, insofar as you need to accept that you are not fully in control and never will be!
- Otherwise, you will torment yourself over every possible permutation that can lead to failure, and your peace of mind will be absolute shot.
- If you are not ready for that stress and responsibility, you should choose another career.
- If you do preserve however, leadership is hard but remarkably rewarding.

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