A Post a Day in May #11: Leadership by the letter

I have pledged to write a new post for this blog every day in May. 

The concept of leadership is much on my mind, as there is such a dearth of it in our world today. Yes, individuals are in positions of leadership, but that does not make those individuals leaders. For it is their actions, not their position, that make them so.  

L E A D E R S H I P: D is for DECISIONS 

Photo by Jens Johnsson on Unsplash 

Anyone in a formal, named position of leadership has the authority, indeed the responsibility (though not necessarily the wisdom) to make decisions. Indeed, the job of a leader is to make decisions. Therefore, I am making D for Decisions. 

To be sure, D could equally well be for delegate: 

• The team will always outperform the individual — no leader is an island, so they must build a strong team and enable them to achieve their own work and responsibilities. 

D could also be for diversify: 

• Too much of the same on your team and you’ll suffer from group think and myopia; difference can be challenging, but it is essential to ensure diversity among people and, therefore, thinking.

But, today, I’m making D for decisions. 

A leader will usually be making decisions that affect others — possibly many others, with ramifications that could be long lasting for individuals, organizations and systems. The risks are big. What if you make the wrong decision? And there, I believe, is the rub for so many. They fear making the wrong decision, so they dilly dally and dawdle and put off deciding what to do, how to proceed, what to say, etc. 

Of course, not making a decision is a decision in itself. But it’s passive rather than active, and it assumes that more data or more experience or more time or more resources would make it easier and therefore better to make a decision at a later time. However, leaders must work with what they have in hand and with what they know at the time the decision is needed. They must plan for what they can reasonably assume to expect. And they must be ready to make more, and possibly different, decisions as new data become known. 

The current COVID-19 pandemic is a living example of this. I won’t name any politicians, but you well know that some leaders are handling the pressure for decisions better than others. Enough said. 

Leaders exist at every level of an organization and in every corner of a community. Sometimes, we are called upon to step into a leadership role quite unexpectedly, for example when an accident occurs. My friend Miriam taught me from her own emergency preparedness training that when you arrive on the scene of an accident, the first thing to do is ask loudly, “Who’s in charge?” Either someone will step forward saying they are, or no one will say anything, in which case you step up and say, “OK, I’m in charge. This is what we’ll do…” and then you proceed to assume the role of leader in that situation by delegating tasks. 

This obviously works best when you have the skills and capacity to assume the role of leader. If there’s a lot of blood on the scene, for example, I would be the least capable of taking on that role! But no matter what the scenario, and all other things being equal, the person willing to take the risk of making a decision becomes the leader.

Leaders must act if they want anyone to follow them, and to make a decision is to take action. As Sir Winston Churchill said, “I never worry about action, but only inaction.” Too bad that so many positions of leadership in our world today are held in name only and not in action. 

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