As a leader, you need diversity

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!!!

Human nature being what it is, we have a tendency to live, work, and socialize with people that looks like us. As a leader, you can't afford to do that. As a leader you should never stop learning and the more diverse the people around you, the more you have to learn and leverage. 

To illustrate the power of diversity, look at your hand. By itself, it's not very powerful. Each finger, by itself, isn't very powerful. But clench them into a fist and get all fingers working together and now you have power! The different fingers represent the diversity of different people on your team.

The idea isn't to become like everyone else but to be willing to understand and entertain different thoughts, perspectives, and ideas.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10 Leadership Lessons From Hal Moore

This week's leadership lesson is inspired by the move, " We Were Soldiers ", starring Mel Gibson. The movie is based on a real life battle during the Viet Nam War. Mel played Lt. Col. Hal Moore, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 7th Calvary. On November 14, 1965, Lt. Col. Moore, and 450 of his men, were dropped by helicopter into the la Drang valley. They were immediately surrounded by around 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Thus began the first full-fledged battle between U.S. and North Vietnamese soldiers. Over the next two days U.S. soldiers were killed but they inflicted around 1,200 casualties and forced the Communist forces to withdraw. The movie, and the battle on which it was based teaches us 10 leadership lessons:(You can read General Moore’s  book .) Be head strong. when the setbacks come (and they will), a leader picks themselves up and keeps moving forward. There's always a way. Either you find one, or you make one. If you think you might fail in a giv
Read more

Defeats

I've written on the subject of defeats before but I came across a quote by Maya Angelou that I love: "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it." We've all suffered defeats. You didn't get the promotion or raise you felt like you had earned. You didn't get the job for which you were SO right. You asked someone out and they turned you down. Failure is a fact of life. I don't know of ANYONE who hasn't had at least one or two failures along the way. A study by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, researchers at Columbia University, found that it's MUCH better to praise a child for his or her EFFORT instead of their RESULTS. They studied 412 fifth graders, ages 10 - 12, and found that when you praised children for being smart, they began to focus solely on results and began to resist trying anythin
Read more

The Golden Circle

Today's tip is very short - just a link really. Simon Sinek is a British-American author, motivational speaker, and organizational consultant. You can find many of his talks on YouTube but I want to direct you to his TED Talk that, in my opinion, "launched" him. It's called "How great leaders inspire action" and he introduces the concept of the "Golden Circle". The talk is less than 20-minutes long and I think you'll find it eye-opening. You can find it  here .
Read more