The Qualities of a Leader:
11. Initiative
Only those who
dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
- Senator Robert F. Kennedy
The way to
succeed is to double your failure rate.
- IBM founder Thomas J. Watson
Successful
people keep moving.
They make
mistakes, but they don’t quit.
- Conrad Hilton, Hotel Executive
There is
nothing brilliant or outstanding in my record, except perhaps this one
thing: I do the things that I believe
ought to be done. . . .And when I make up my mind to do a thing, I act.
- President Theodore Roosevelt
There are followers and there
are leaders. Which are you?
I know many of you reading this have a title that
says ‘leader,’ but you were chosen for your position because of your knowledge
of your field, your prior success in running a department, or your ability to
follow through on the directives of your superiors, not necessarily because you
are a leader per se.
Actually leadership and follow-ship form two ends of
a continuum. Everybody has both
qualities in varying amounts, depending on the circumstances. And then some personalities are geared more
for one or the other. And then in the
end, of course, you have a choice. When
a person is a follower, they generally will work entirely within their comfort
zone. Someone else makes the decisions,
and they take the responsibility for the outcomes. A leader often will have to break out of
their comfort zone to head in a new direction.
Starting a new company is one such example, where the leader makes the
rules for everything and pays the price for any failures.
Maxwell tells the story of Kemmons Wilson, who felt
he wasn’t being paid fairly for his work as a bookkeeper. He was told he was too young to make what the
older bookkeepers made, so he quit and never worked for anyone else again. He went on to found the Holiday Inn chain of
hotels. He didn’t like the ones he
stayed in on his travels, so he started his own.
We noted previously that “to lead” also means “to
show the way.” If something is wrong, if
something is broken, if something needs to be improved, if something is not
going as well as it should, if something needs to be changed, you can wait
around for somebody else to do it. Or,
the leader will say, I will do it myself.
That is initiative, taking the effort to make things happen.
Maxwell lists 4 parts of this process of
showing initiative.
1) Leaders
know what they want.
2) They
push themselves to act.
3) They
take more risks.
4) They
make more mistakes.
Remember, if success was easy, everybody would be
one. I lost my job while trying to do
the right thing and while doing my best for a bigger cause. I don’t know yet what the next step is, so I
can’t tell you yet how this failure was either a stepping stone or in any way
contributed to my future success. But I
tried to do the right thing, and that is always the right thing to do.
I am not asking you to do anything because I say so,
but then I didn’t make up the laws of leadership. They are as true as the law of gravity. So what do you want? From your team? From your life? From life itself? If you do nothing, that may just well be what
you get in return. Nothing.
