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leadership
By accident or purpose, you've been put in charge of others. Good leadership is a combination of action, stewardship, vision, and wisdom. You'd better assess the responsibility and risk that that entails, otherwise people get hurt or resources get lost. This guide is a one-page GULP of highly-distilled management experience. If you want to be a leader, you have to do the work to unpack and digest each part of it. If there were a better guide, there would have been better leaders by now.
There are two and only two enemies of a leader:
Grandstanding: Hey you won! But no one cared about that. What they cared about was that you got things done that had tangible benefits to the community's values.
Hidden blow of this enemy? Data overload. If you don't know how to delegate, you will be swamped with minutae. Advice: Try one of the many books about management and delegation.
Entrenchment: You've worn a track going around with routine ways of handling things. Now you're dug yourself so far in that you can't see over the rut you've made. While the former enemy entices you with ego, this enemy entices you with comforts.
Hidden blow here? Misplaced trust. You've got tons of advisors, swamping you with intelligence but, in the end, no actionable knowledge. Without good data you can't lead, but you also have to learn to extract knowledge from all of your information sources, otherwise it will distract you. No amount of spending on "data mining" software can do it for you. You have to climb the pyramid of data:information:knowledge:wisdom. Advice: Start small. Try being a mayor or a public administrator. Learn where all the ropes are and how to handle them by organizing data flows. And remember that Death is always chasing you...
Those who get defeated by the first enemy succumb to power and eventually get the boot, perhaps after a very high personal cost (cf. Hitler). Those who get defeated by the second, get shuffled to the sideline never knowing that the limelight has left them in the dark (Roosevelt after WWII).
Don't be the person that makes everyone give up on their organization. Fortunately, there are allies. Read on...
STUB...
There are two allies to help you understand the enemy and perfect yourself. That puts you at even odds with the universe itself.
- Failure: A leader by definition breaches the Known and explores new territory.
- Tree of Knowledge: Your brain forms and assembles knowledge to avoid repeating past mistakes.
REWRITING...
There are four masteries to perfect yourself. A good leader doesn't shy away from challenges, but dives into them. The crucibles are formed two contradictory forces in tension. As you perfect yourself, you will be perfecting power. You have to choose when to utilize each, allow yourself to fail and learning as you go. If you don't allow yourself, you won't leave the island of the known. You can't be limited to any preconceived rules from reason alone, otherwise everyone else would have fixed it all already.
- The Decision Maker: Being Decisive vs. Keeping an Attentive Calm
- Perfect Delegator: Pushing the River vs. Going with the Flow
- Mastery of Data: Elite Data Maven vs. Avoiding Noise
- Purity of Purpose: Personal Accomplishment vs. Making Community Successes
True leaders have a foundation to stand on. It's not easy to come by -- either you need Truth (capital "T") or have a long basis of experience to earn community Respect (capital "R" -- not respect out of fear). They stay constantly vigilant towards their arena of governance and delegate tasks to maintain that awareness.
When you defeat the first enemy, you become a person-of-action that people are willing to put their full faith into because you're no longer compensating for a lack of ideas.
When you defeat the second, you become a respected authority for the community knowing that life is too precious to waste on friviloties and ego.
Along the path, you must master (respectively, to each ally): reason (rather than being merely logically consistent or self-righteous), decisiveness (rather than being negligent or passive), integrity (rather than being obsequious or friendly), and power (rather than being vain or weak-willed).
Finally, at the end of this path, when working for virtues like Truth, Justice, Harmony, and Beauty, you will find endless possibilities await to make a better world.
See also:
Category: Justice League