The older I get, the more people I meet, and the more places I’ve worked at, the more I realise how valuable true leadership is.
When I first wanted to be in a leadership position, I think deep down, it was a feeling of significance that I was actually after. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, everyone wants to feel significant, but it showed that I wasn’t really ready to be in a leadership position.
What I’ve learnt over the years, is that leadership isn’t about getting attention; it’s not about the significance (even though if we’re really honest, it’s a nice perk). What leadership is about is serving. It’s about contributing and caring for others, to pull together towards a common goal.
You’ll notice I didn’t say my goal, or your goal. I said common goal. That’s because leadership shouldn’t be about you. It should be about the outcomes you all want, and that means considering what other people want.
Give people what they want, and you’ll get what you want.
It can be hard to balance the scales between what your customers want, what you want, what your employees want, and what’s best for your business.
That’s why true leadership is a hard skill to find.
Develop this skill however, and you’ll have a unique ability to provide cohesiveness in teams, synergy in business, as well as direction and vision to build remarkable things.
Even more importantly, you’ll be contributing to the people or world around you. Here are my top five leadership blogs to help develop your skills:
1. TED I’ve linked to the blog, but in reality it’s the TED talk videos that I think are remarkable. TED talks are not only of a high calibre, but they’re on a variety of topics (often at the cutting edge).
TED talks can be introspective as well as on important management, leadership, industry or business topics. Some of the best are:
- How great leaders inspire action
- How to live before you die
- The happy secret to better work
- Why we do what we do
- The single biggest reason why startups succeed
- 8 secrets of success
2. HBR I know, Harvard Business Review is a magazine/website, not a blog. But in reality, the definition of a ‘blog’ has evolved quite a bit, so I’m going to stretch it further to include HBR.
If you want something well researched, interesting and credible, HBR is a good place to go.
3. Seth Godin Seth Godin is famous for building Yoyodyne (consequently sold to Yahoo for around $30 Million) and Squidoo (acquired by HubPages) as well as his books on marketing such as the Purple Cow.
Although his blog revolves around marketing, his work is primarily aimed at being thought provoking.
4. Jason Fried Jason Fried became notable through 37signals, a company now known as Basecamp. While he continues to reach new heights with basecamp, he’s also became renowned for his blog signal vs noise, and his book rework.
Jason shares yet another perspective on the ‘rules’ of work and life, giving a fresh perspective in his speech at TED.
5. Tim Ferriss While I don’t always agree with what Tim says or how he presents information, many of his posts are certainly interesting and help you to think of things from a different perspective.
What seems to be a reoccurring theme in what Tim writes is that while many people live their lives by the rules of other people, these rules should be challenged because in many cases, they’re wrong.