Leadership Secrets: The Power of Being Unyielding & Open Minded

 How your ability to hold both positions sets you apart as a leader

Nobody wants to follow an asshole. 

Leadership is not about your authority, it’s not about telling people what to do. Your position doesn’t make you better than anyone else.

You’re probably thinking, how they hell can you be “unyielding” as a leader while still being open minded … these are not the same.

Unyielding — adjective
unable to bend or be penetrated under pressure; hard:
trees so unyielding that they broke in the harsh north winds.

not apt to give way under pressure; inflexible; firm:
her unyielding faith.

People follow those who take charge. Who are confident. Who default to action and make decisions.

When leading a team, they expect you to be able to provide this structure, to provide them the context and the guidelines that they need to operate.

How then can you mix these two ideas to be a kick ass leader while delivering results?

It’s all in where you apply each idea.

You have to be unyielding on your principles and open minded on how you implement them.

That’s it.

One of the best examples I can give you from my own journey. I never manage a report. As a leader, you are always looking at results. How’s your department doing, what did the last project cost, are we over budget, are we not selling enough … doesn’t matter. Numbers run the world.

While this is true, never make your decisions in order to make the report look pretty if the decision isn’t the right thing for your team or the business.

You are unyielding on this principal, but then you work with your team to get to the right results. This is where you need to be open minded. You need to take new inputs, new ideas. You may need to accept that your last decision (while seemingly a good one at the time) is not having the results you expected, that you were wrong and that you need to do something differently.

Here are my five key lessons for any leader out there to improve; these are especially useful for new managers as you are the most susceptible to blurring the line between confidence and being egotistical.

1. Always know your why (lead by principles)
2. Always work to make things better than you found them
3. Be brutally honest with yourself
4. Never pick short term gains at the sacrifice of long term goals
5. Winning isn’t everything. Always trying to look right and making other feels like they are always wrong will never be a benefit

While these are some of my personal lessons, it’s important to note that there is no one way to be a leader.

The most important part of leadership is authenticity, which means that what you take in and how you behave has to connect and be apparent in the type of person you are.

If some of these ideas work for you, I’m glad. Take them.

My best advice to anyone?

Take the best from any idea or any person that aligns with you. Discard the rest. You are always growing, always becoming the next version of yourself.

Don’t ever hold yourself back to how someone else tells you to be.