Choosing to Lead

Taking Responsibility for Ideas, Outcomes, and Others

Image by Michael Tucker from Unsplash

Leadership drives, creates, guides, and connects.

Leaders motivate themselves and others to achieve what is important, what is new, what is improved. Leaders create and set the vision, influence others to see what they see, then motivate and make things happen. Leaders also teach and assess the ongoing development of leadership skills within the people they themselves lead.

Leaders change lives, trajectories, and outcomes. Leadership matters in our personal lives, in our professional endeavors, in our homes, neighborhoods and cities, in the way we manage ourselves day-to-day, and on society-wide scale.

Leadership - A Choice-Driven Behavior

Leadership is often associated with a title, a rank, or a particular set of credentials. Leadership has nothing to do with rank however. Leadership is a choice. Leadership is choosing to take responsibility for ideas, outcomes, for others, and for making things better. Leaders don’t wait to be chosen, and leaders don’t seek or require organizational blessings to be curious, to act, or to inspire and pursue positive change. When people take responsibility and make particular choices regarding their focus and behavior, leadership happens. More specifically, leadership happens when:

• People choose to share and commit to big ideas, and

• People take responsibility for and on behalf of people, a vision, or on behalf of a cause bigger than themselves.

In his 2008 leadership manifesto Tribes, Seth Godin expounds on the maxim that leadership is a choice, and states

“One can choose to lead or not, can choose to have faith or not. One can choose to contribute or not.

Are there thousands of reasons why YOU, of all people, aren’t the right one to lead? Reasons why you don’t have the resources or the authority or the genes or the momentum? Probably. And so what? You still get to make the choice.”

Image by Ashley Piszek from Unsplash

We are all called at points to lead — in our workplace, on a team, in the classroom, within our families and on our block. We are called to lead when confronting an emergency or when faced with someone who needs our help. Leadership is about awareness, choosing, caring, and taking responsibility.

Leading a Life, Living a Story

While leadership may sound like a tall order, we lead ourselves every day. Each of us makes hundreds of daily decisions, lives a story, and leads a life. The question is, are you living a story that aligns with what and who you value? A life of serving good and others? If you are a spectator in life and move through your days from a place of “whatever” or “I don’t feel like it”, if you look for reasons why something didn’t or won’t happen, or if you routinely engage in negative thinking and behaviors, those choices have shaped the life you are leading.

Choosing NOT to make decisions or take action toward better is the way many people lead their lives. Whether you choose to be an active positive participant in your life, or to be a whatever/laissez-faire bystander, you are designing and leading your life every hour, every day. Accepting responsibility and our own agency paves the way to shaping our experiences, our relationships with others, our academic, career and Personal Development, and the ways we serve our community. Accepting responsibility for ourselves, and accepting the agency we’ve had all along puts us in a position to open up, to listen, to help, and to do big and even great things.

Each of us is an astonishing combination of skill, perspective, strengths, experiences, insights, caring and potential. I am and you are too. The potential of the human heart and mind, along with our capacity for caring is immense, caring to do things beautifully and just so, caring enough to step into the arena and make life and circumstances better. We are each equipped to shape our future — in fact we’ve been doing so all along. Shaping our present and future requires self-reflective LEADERSHIP. Take responsibility for ideas, outcomes, and others. Choose leadership. Positively manage yourself as you look out for those to the left of you, to the right of you, ahead of you and behind you. Connect to the capable leader in you by accepting your personal agency, and by accepting responsibility for your words, choices, character, and actions.