Over the past couple of years, businesses across the country are shifting away from the mentality of hiring employees to simply be employees; they are quickly understanding the importance of building up leaders to run certain areas of their company and hopefully find talent to lead it into the future. However, this new approach is also demonstrating the mistakes being made in the process of building new leaders.
Therefore, the following includes information on a couple of leadership myths that need to be debunked.
Leaders are only Your Top Performers
Perhaps the most common myth regarding leaders is that they are always the top performers at the company. However, this cannot be further from the truth. Sure, your top performers can definitely be leaders, but it’s not always the case. Being good at your job is just that, being good at your job. This doesn’t mean that person can lead or overcome inner office challenges such as employee disputes. Therefore it is important to open your mind to every level of your company to search for those leaders.
Failure Should Never be an Option Myth
You’ve heard it a million times within movies and television shows. The main actor/actress is ready to go into the fight and states that failure is not an option. Although it might sound great on the big screen, failure in business is often needed to grow. Leadership is not about never failing but learning from the failure and using that to grow.
Leadership is Consistency
A dangerous mindset to have is that everything must be going great if it’s consistent. However, some of the most successful leaders will tell you that it’s not consistency but flexibility that demonstrates true leadership. A true leader is willing and able to hear out their employees about changes that can help the company.
Leaders Know it All
For many years, we’ve been thought that leaders are leaders in their fields because they know it all. But this is often never the case in business. Those leaders who end up being successful are the ones that understood very early on that they didn’t know it all. They searched for advice from mentors, their own research, and even their own employees.