Tuesday, September 29, 2009

The Qualities of Skillful Leadership by Jim Rohn

The Qualities of Skillful Leadership
by Jim Rohn

If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, the key is to
becoming a person of quality yourself. Leadership is the ability to
attract someone to the gifts, skills, and opportunities you offer as an
owner, as a manager and as a parent. I call leadership the great
challenge of life.

What's important in leadership is refining your skills. All great leaders
keep working on themselves until they become effective. Here are
some specifics:

1) Learn to be strong but not rude. It is an extra step you must
take to become a powerful, capable leader with a wide range of reach.
Some people mistake rudeness for strength. It's not even a good
substitute.

2) Learn to be kind but not weak. We must not mistake kindness
for weakness. Kindness isn't weak. Kindness is a certain type of
strength. We must be kind enough to tell somebody the truth. We
must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line. We
must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.

3) Learn to be bold but not a bully. It takes boldness to win the
day. To build your influence, you've got to walk in front of your group.
You've got to be willing to take the first arrow, tackle the first problem,
discover the first sign of trouble.

4) You've got to learn to be humble, but not timid. You can't get
to the high life by being timid. Some people mistake timidity for
humility. Humility is almost a God-like word. A sense of
awe, a sense of wonder, an awareness of the human soul and
spirit...an understanding that there is something unique about the
human drama versus the rest of life. Humility is a grasp of the
distance between us and the stars, yet having the feeling that we're
part of the stars. So humility is a virtue; but timidity is a disease.
Timidity is an affliction. It can be cured, but it is a problem.

5) Be proud but not arrogant. It takes pride to win the day. It takes
pride to build your ambition. It takes pride in community. It takes
pride in cause, in accomplishment. But the key to becoming a good
leader is being proud without being arrogant. In fact I believe the
worst kind of arrogance is arrogance from ignorance. It's when you
don't know that you don't know. That kind of arrogance is intolerable.
If someone is smart and arrogant, we can tolerate that. But if
someone is ignorant and arrogant, that's just too much to take.

6) Develop humor without folly. That's important for a leader. In
leadership, we learn that it's okay to be witty, but not silly.