What you choose identifies you, as a person, a social or business, role and as an intelligent being. I choose, for instance, PC vs Mac, or both, or Ubuntu, or iPad or Android, or anything for that matter. And that selection shifts your way and many of your decisions toward the one or another direction!
Choose Your Leaders Carefully
Every choice you made comes with advantages and disadvantages. But it comes in pairs!
You cannot select only the one, versus the other. You can enhance some features (i.e. you can tweaking, customize, upgrade something, like choosing to add more memory or larger disk on your PC or Mac), but you cannot change its nature.
This is truer, about the people (or the leaders, if you like), we choose to follow.
What Leaders?
With the term “leaders” I mean here, not only the persons, the schemes, the groups or the ideas you choose to follow.
For me, it has a broader meaning. It Includes paradigms, raw models, examples, books influence us, persons of the past, relatives or people from close environment influence us, coaches and teachers, tools, culture(s), lifestyle, examples and principles, ideals, values, methodologies, business, practices, traits and features, strategies and tactics, products, attitudes, skills, vision, life plans and goals, etc.
Anything, anyone and everything that might influence me (you!) and respects your personal boundaries, values, and principles you cherish and uphold.
And, of course, nothing is been given a free pass in my thought and mental ecosystem.
Everything I would eventually incorporate, practice and uphold in my everyday life, would past a period of examination, scrutiny, doubt, verification, re-evaluation, etc. in order to be tested in real situations!
Only when this period ends and the idea, concept or person have passed my personal filters and convinced me for his/her/its value in my life, becomes part of my life.
This process creates eventually clever mental filters that no leave anything to “enter” in my personal sphere of thinking, doing, behaving and acting without scrutiny and examination.
How Can You Choose a Leader?
So, eventually, how you choose? There is a different approach for different people, of course. And everything, as everything(!), is a matter of personal responsibility (you are after all responsible for the things you select and follow) and style!
An approach for you to select a Leader might (or should) consist of various parts. A “leader” worthy to be followed, should incorporate:
- Vision, you can relate to and it can inspire you,
- Cause, you find useful, just and proper for yourself and your society,
- Consistency with reality,
- Tangible outputs in real situations,
- Objectives you can relate to, follow, use in your life and convey them to the lives of other people,
- Crystal clear understanding of what is expected of you since you choose to adopt or enter a situation, association, group, etc (i.e. rules of participation and engagement),
- A flow of communication in all levels (i.e. not secret agendas or cloudy terms!)
- Propulsion for making you a better person
- Empower you to enhance yourself and all people around you.
- Better results for you in your everyday personal and professional life
- …
A Leadership Selection Funnel
There is a pattern you can discern from the previous sections. Something that might help you to choose a “leader”? If there is one (and that is my personal view), it might be one a funnel of criteria (the lower in cardinal order should support the one above it), as the following:
- (as its base) personal values and principles,
- Personal tendency for better your life and that of the others,
- Personal Mental Filters, attitudes, and behaviors,
- Interest in the “leader’s ecosystem” (culture?),
- Study and examination of the basic leader’s premises and attributes, and purposeful selection of the most suitable for your life (i.e. those aligned to your personal objectives!),
- Employment of leader’s features in your life and evaluation of the results,
- (if the evaluation is successful) Modeling of these behaviors in your everyday life and intended mirroring of such attributes in all aspects of your personal and professional life in order to incorporate to your character,
- Awareness of the value of the selected principles for your life,
- Loyalty, advocacy and propagation of the basic premises you choose to uphold,
- Constant filtering and review according to real situations, and
- Intention on following the “leader”(!)
So What I Can Do?
The basic formula is that you should do not provide blind allegiance to people or ideas you have not tested thoroughly as suitable for your loyalty or who/which does not prove worthy under various criteria and specifications.
You should always examine their intentions, their value for you and their premises and always should be ready to abandon a “leader” if he/she/it is not worthy of your expectations.
