What is Great Leadership?

The question, What is Great Leadership?, is one that insights much emotion and carries the weight of its influence.  Just the thought of great leadership makes you sit up a little straighter and look to the future with optimism. Great leadership, I would hope, is something that we have all have experienced at one point or another. 

I have. And I recognize its worth and contribution to my life partially because of the feeling I have now that it is gone. Great leadership has a tangible, palpable influence; you can see it and taste it in the ways we interact and run our organizations. It can create spaces that inspire, conversations that encourage and individuals that have exponential impact on the communities of people we touch. 

I have had quite a few managers in my relatively short career but one mentor and boss, Regiane, has shown me through her daily actions what great leadership looks like. 

Great leadership looks like courage, and honesty, and humility. It looks like the ability to give candid feedback while encouraging and empowering improvement. It’s giving praise and credit in a room full of important people and criticism behind a closed door. It is putting the relationship first and being intentional with celebrating people’s lives. Great leadership is creating a safe space for learning… and for failure. It is building a team that is centered on each other’s success and supports growth and change with gusto. 

Great leadership can come in different packages but it always feels the same. It feels like hope and ambition. It labors like passion and potential. It tastes like empowerment and achievement. It feels like you should never leave. 

Great leadership is something we should reach for, ask for and provide for the people around us. Great Leadership is waking up every day and making the decision to be bold enough, and brave enough, to make the hard decisions and to do best by your people. 

Just like you can feel great leadership and identify it, so too can we see poor management and leadership that fails to rise to the occasion. In my experience, this looked like dismissals and favoritism. It looked like broken promises and a lack of effort to coach and teach. It looks like downplaying the experience I did have in an effort to undermine my confidence. It looked like more walls than windows and no open doors. 

It looks like I will never again work for her. 

Great leadership leaves you wanting to be more than you thought possible and wanting to inspire and help those around you. It leaves you as a better more refined version of yourself. Great leadership grows buds of greatness and roots of self-confidence. It takes the seedling of your past and slowly starts to form the sapling of your present. It prepares you to withstand and weather storms you didn’t know you could survive. Great leadership is a catalyst for a better tomorrow.