Leadership... what is leadership?

I’ve taken a lot of little seminars on the subject through various positions training myself and my co-workers on the subject.  And there are obvious key elements they always teach you:

Integrity, dedication, magnanimity, humility, openness, fairness, assertiveness, and a sense of humor; all very important leadership qualities… having good coping skills and the ability to think factually rather than emotionally. 

But the most important leadership skill I’ve ever realized is the ability to stop being a cog in the wheel.  I hate more than anything else when a corporation puts forth an initiative or comes up with a new buzz-word and all of middle-management starts throwing the word around like it was the most amazing thing they’ve ever heard.

The word of the day is “XXX” we might as well all be on Sesame Street.  And what’s worse is when it gets pushed down through the ranks and misinterpreted.  It’s sort of like that game I played as a kid at girl guide camp where one person whispers something in your ear, you whisper it to the next person and so on and so on and by the time it gets to the end the word is completely misconstrued. 

The most important leadership skill they should be teaching is common sense.  Buzz words have their place; we need to call things something and we need to be able to describe different methodologies and frameworks.  If not how would Taiichi Ohno have become famous throughout the manufacturing community?  But learning to speak Japanese hasn’t made me a better leader.  Learning his methods and common sense way to reduce waste, decrease variation in a process and sort, set in order, shine standardize and sustain did.

5S is a method for cleaning and organizing a work station.  Brilliant... absolutely, but before hearing that word common sense should have already told me that a more organized and well-managed area would be easier and more productive to work in.

Management frameworks of any kind are just that a Framework.  A basis to teach and describe best practices, perfect tools for growing young leaders, but beyond that common sense needs to come in to play.  Instead of corporations brainwashing middle-managers with mountains of spreadsheets and fancy charts and telling them follow this exact step by step guide and everything will be better.  We need to start teaching people to think for themselves.

Act with integrity, have dedication, but most of all Think for yourself!  If it doesn’t make sense don’t do it!

It seems lately we are all caught up with what the latest buzz word guide told us to do.  Policy says do it this way, so do it this way... No exceptions.  Well as a leader there are always exceptions, every situation is different and applying a one-size fits all solution to every problem is just the wrong way to get ahead.