Do You Have Leadership Potential?
How good a leader are you?
How do you assess your leadership qualities? Not very difficult at all. The moment you instinctively raise your hand and volunteer to carry out a task, you realize your leadership skills. This generally happens at a young age particularly when children go through school which is their second home.
The chances of a mature individual acquiring leadership skills is not ruled out though, thanks to the countless number of courses that we have today that boast of making leaders out of you. But it is a fact that no one can become a leader overnight. It is due to the presence of a natural tendency and the skills that one learns along the way as he grows up that makes him a leader.
Is there "a born leader"?
The answer to this question is both 'yes' and 'no'. When you excel in displaying your leadership qualities, people tend to call you 'a born leader'. But there is actually nothing called 'a born leader'. Man is not what he is but what he makes of himself. Every human being does have the leadership instinct but it stays latent in a majority of the population.
Most of the traits that an individual possesses are dependent on the environment he/she is brought up in. Let me just mention 'he' for all practical purposes, otherwise if I were to concentrate on the gender, the purpose of this hub would be defeated. When we raise our children in a positive way encouraging them and allowing freedom to the permissible extent, then we could say that they are likely to develop leadership skills.
As parents, when you over protect and pamper your children, they are likely to depend on you for each and every action and will not have enough confidence to be independent, so obviously their chances of leading a group are minimal. So an individual's upbringing plays a very crucial role in molding a person into a leader or otherwise.
Traits you see in a leader
A leader is one who:
- does things for the sake of a group or community and not for himself alone
- is responsible and is aware of what he is doing because the others are watching him
- is able to gain the trust of people around him
- is able to motivate the others to follow him
- is continuously learning from the others around him and treats his followers well
- encourages team work because he knows that things can be better done when people work in a team
- accepts healthy input from the people around him so that he is able to make a sensible decision
- is endowed with patience and persistence
- gets things done but also works with the others because he believes that he has to initiate matters so that the others will emulate his actions
I wish to conclude this hub with 2 great quotes from 2 of the world's great men:
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
~Former US President John Quincy Adams
Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate them. Inventories can be managed but people must be led.
~Dallas Billionaire Ross Perot
So, leadership is all about people, engaging, educating and motivating them and fine tuning them towards working to build a better society and a better world.