What is it to be a Leader?

A deep understanding of a leader's role

Before answering the main question, we should start with what a leader is. And the answer is simple: A leader has followers! Also, it is important to emphasize that being a boss does not mean being a leader and I will discuss that below.

Back then I studied many subjects about leadership in my MBA and other courses and at some point, I was faced with this table that I found very interesting and would like to share with you.

Boss	Leader
Drives employees	Coaches employees
Depends on authority	Depends on goodwill
Inspires fear	Generates enthusiasm
Says "I"	Says "We"
Place blame for the breakdown	Fixes the breakdown
Know how it's done	Show how it's done
Uses people	Develops people
Takes credit	Gives credit
Commands	Ask
Says "Go"	Says "Let's go"

It might be self-explanatory however there are a lot of skills that it is needed to have those actions. Being a leader demands a set of skills that needs to be learned, the same as parenting. I will discuss 3 of those that I believe are the must-have ones.

Care

Definitely the most important one for me by far. Let's do an exercise and see the table above and compare each one of the lines and see if there is care on one side and not on the other. I hope it was clear for you to see the difference.

When we care about other people, their well-being becomes important to us, but it can't be something fake, we should truly pay attention to their needs and help them to overcome whatever happened.

I love a guy called Simon Sinek and in one of his speeches he said: "Being a good leader is just like being a good parent." Simple and powerful. Which parent doesn't want to see their kids grow and prosper? Which parent see their kids struggle and think, yeah whatever. So, care and take care of the ones that chose to follow you, that chose to be part of the company or sector you are in charge of.

Altruism

Problems will come, then is when this skill comes into practice. Altruism is when we act to promote someone else's welfare, even at risk or cost to ourselves. There is a common saying back home that says it: "It is when the problem comes that we see the real person." And it is true when the pressure comes when we show ourselves but thinking about the other one first can bring a very deep impact on your organization.

Studies suggest that when you help others, it can promote physiological changes in the brain linked with happiness. Helping others can also improve our support networks and encourage us to be more active. and improve our self-esteem.

Critical Thinking

This skill is a bit less related to people however is important to don't let our team down. Critical thinking is a kind of thinking in which you question, analyze, interpret, evaluate, and make a judgment about everything. Understanding and judging how to fix the problem we have in the present and might have in the future brings credibility and but most important, trust from your team.

There is something called Risk Management that can help you do critical thinking. To apply this management method in a simple way you can create a table and start adding your main processes or tasks (category), then play the devil's advocate and list everything that can go wrong (risk), and then finish creating and applying controls to avoid them. Here is an example of it:

	Category	Risk	Control
1	Project costs	Increase the spending without planning	Create a weekly report and meet with the team to discuss it
2	...	...	...

I want to make clear that this is a very simple way to apply risk management with your team and it should work for most companies, but if you feel that this isn't your case please do a deeper search about it and I am pretty sure you will learn a very good tool.

Thanks for reading and I hope you can achieve a bit more.