How to Be A Better Leader

Jessica Higgins wrote this last week to the Gapingvoid Culture Design Group mailing list of 50,000 fans. If you would like to receive her and her team's work to your daily email, sign up for free HERE. 

It’s quite easy, telling people what to do.

What’s hard to do is all the complicated stuff.
The grinding. The innovation work.

Selling. Developing. Connecting with customers in new ways.

The real work is made for us brave folks.

As for that “telling other people what to do” business,

The best leaders never have to do it at all. The best leaders align people to the right mindset, and inspire greatness without having to pay you, yell at you, whatever else.  
The management nonsense of the past was made to wrap around people who weren’t meant to lead. Nowadays it simple doesn’t work.

Partly because we’ve discovered leadership is a set of beliefs and skills. But more so, because of the time and energy the great leaders put into learning. It also what makes not-so-great leaders stick out like a sore thumb.

Inside of every organization, there’s a layer of old guards. They’re the middle management folks that don’t belong. If you put in the work to get promoted, your work has just begun. The leadership work and the skills-based work are completely different sets.

We all know exactly who these folks are inside our workplaces.

The old guards of information.
The old guards of “the way we we’ve always done things”.
The old guards of keeping business complex.

Keeping those of us who believe in true leadership, out.

Jessica Higgins, JD MBA BB is a workplace expert. She is Chief Operating Officer of Gapingvoid Culture Design Group and a Board Advisor in organizations in technology and the arts. Her mission is to help others. She is based in Miami Beach, FL and travels worldwide for her work in culture design as a strategist, speaker and author.