HOW COLORFUL IS YOUR LEADERSHIP?
“What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.” - Joshua Foer
Colors play an important role in our lives. Have you ever thought about what the world would be like without color? Can you say boring?!
My son and I was playing golf on an adult 18-hole course for the first time just the other day. We stepped up onto one of the tee boxes and he said, “Daddy this is beautiful.” It is not quite fall in Tennessee yet but you can see some of the trees turning orange and red. So the mountains are covered with various trees with beautiful red, orange, and green hues. This is what sparked this comment from my son.
Have you ever seen something that made you stop and say WOW!?
The color of your leadership will determine your level of influence. You will gain more followers when you decide to infuse your leadership with some color. People will stop and be wowed when you your leadership is colorful. This is one of the reasons organizations spend a tremendous amount of time on choosing the right color for their logo. Here are a few ways to add color to your leadership.
1. Develop Yourself
Are you developing yourself? Benjamin Franklin one of the Founding Fathers of the United States said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
You cannot lead or develop anyone else without first leading and developing yourself. The more educated and informed you are in your area of expertise will help to add color to your leadership.
2. Build A Team
Do you have a team? As a leader, you are committed to a dream or vision. However, no vision or dream can be achieved without a team.
Steve Jobs co-founder of Apple and one of the greatest American information technology entrepreneurs believed in this conviction. He said, “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
Great things not only happen in businesses with teamwork, but great things happen in any aspect of your life with a good team of people. Teamwork adds color to your leadership.
3. Diversify Your Team
What are the skill sets of those people on your team? You want every person on your team to compliment each other. Everyone doesn’t need to do the same thing.
We cannot be good at everything, which is why we need to diversify our team. To add color to your leadership choose people to be on your team that can compliment you and your weaknesses. Find people that have strengths in areas in which you have weaknesses.
4. Serve Others
How much time do you spend serving others? Another way to add some color to your leadership is by serving others with exceptional; service.
Zig Ziglar salesman and motivational speaker said, “You will get all you want out of life, if you help enough other people get what they want.” Theodore Roosevelt the 26th President of the United States said it like this, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Serving others helps us and the people we are leading understand that life is less about self and more about helping others. Life is not about what you can get but what you can give. However, we will have our fair share of getting or gaining when we give enough.
Most great leaders lead in a colorful manner. I challenge you to do the same. Don’t get caught up in doing it the same way just because that’s the way it has been done for years. Change things up and add some color to your leadership. More color in your leadership means more followers. Make the most of influence by making it colorful.
How can you make your leadership more colorful? Please leave a comment below, send me a tweet on Twitter, or leave a comment on Facebook.