Leadership Can't Be Forced

My work Philosophy, as a team lead, is to close the knowledge gap between myself and those working with me. I do this in order to not be the bottleneck on the project. If, for whatever reason, I'm not there then the project can keep going uninterrupted. 

To achieve this goal, there's a lot of training in the form of mentorship, meetings, documentation... 

Recently, I realized that not everyone is comfortable in the "spotlight" of leadership which made me re-think my approach entirely. To be a leader is something you choose to be and not everyone makes that decision. Looking back, I can see that I've lost a lot of time and effort into someone that just didn't want to take on any sort of leadership position within the team. 

Maybe in the future he'll want to but for now he's comfortable doing the necessities and having someone he can turn to for questions when ever he needs.

What I learn from this ordeal is simply this: you can't force someone to do something they don't want to and trying to convince them is a waste of time.

Leaders aren't born - leadership is a skill that can be learned by whoever has the desire for it. It would be great if everyone would be leaders, as it's easier to work with people that can think for themselves, but the reality is that you'll always have people that prefer non-leadership roles and you simply have to learn to work with them.

Keep Things Simple

 

People are not interested in things that are complicated. Knowing this, if you want people to be interested in what you want to share then be sure to word it in a way that they will understand.

Using movies as an example of this, if we take the Terminator series we can definitely see that it's no longer the behemoth franchise that it once was and one of the reason for that is because the plot became too complicated and branched off in all sorts of direction that many, including myself, felt it was moving away from the core material.

If you ever listened to Neil Degrase Tyson then you definitely know about his ability to keep people interested. He doesn't beat around the bushes and uses words that everyone understands in order to explain complicated concepts. Neil understands that the goal isn't to make everyone Astrophysicists but to get people interested enough to seek more information for themselves - leave the complicated material for the books and the Universities.

Want Nothing

 

Many are looking to get their hands on the next generation of gaming consoles but are unable to. Some can't wait and are going to "scalpers" to get their fix; paying twice, or triple, the amount it would normally cost.

My advice to you is to have patience because whenever you're in a situation where you desperately want something to occur you're setting yourself up to be taken advantage of. In this case, if you're willing to wait, you'll not only get the product at the suggested price but you may also be getting a better deal out of it.
Remember that companies are doing what ever they can to make something available to you. Since they WANT you to buy their items then let them figure out how best to get it to you.

Sit back and let it come to you.