Common Sense Leadership: Cultivating a Helpful Attitude

This week, in our series about Common Sense Leadership, we'll discuss how attitude is everything. Over the past four weeks, we've discussed humility as our foundation, being about the team, asking helpful questions, and caring genuinely about our teammates.

Leadership is not bestowed on us by our position or title. Certainly, some are promoted to positions with great responsibility and turn out to be ineffective leaders. Why is this the case? 

In my experience, the most common reason for poor leadership is insecurity. Sometimes people get over-promoted or, as the wonderful management book The Peter Principle states, people can be promoted to their level of incompetence. To clarify, an individual who may perform well at one level may not end up performing well at the next level. The promotion may call for different skills such that a perfectly competent worker may become incompetent or simply be overwhelmed with the new and/or greater responsibilities.

In the case of over-promotion, insecurity, which is often subconscious, leads some individuals to adopt poor, ineffective management styles. These styles can include poor communication, failure to share, failure to help people advance, command and control style, not asking for ideas, a failure to hire good people and/or to develop one's current team, etc.

In our Ideas & Advice, we frequently mention that quiet confidence is an important quality of leadership presence.

How do we overcome our insecurities and gain this quiet confidence? We need to change our attitude. If we get promoted and are unsure of our responsibilities,it's okay to be vulnerable. It’s ok to ask questions, ask for ideas, and ask for feedback. No one is perfect or has all the good ideas. We all can use help and we should admit it. It's called continuous improvement and it is the key to success.

We also need to let our colleagues know that we are a team. We need to signal that we want to help one another, from the boss to the intern. This type of helpful attitude will boost our team, our organization and ourselves.

Real leadership is influencing and guiding others to do good work, to do the right things. Some lead thousands of people, some hundreds, yet if we influence and help even just one person do good work and be her best self, we are a leader! So much in business and life is about our attitude.  If we adopt this attitude of wanting to help our teammates, we will be a great leader!