Thistle Sounding off: Leadership Leadership is a big responsibility. It comes with great rewards – people trust you, follow you, admire you, and are inspired by you. Equally, however, it comes with a fair amount of disrespect, fear and the desire to lop the tall poppy. Coping with criticism in a leadership context is not a case of reacting defensively to justify your actions. Instead, it requires a much more expansive comprehension of how your actions are perceived by others and how you perceive their actions. While its not easy taking the analytical road over the critical, doing so brings the best outcomes for both the short and long terms. Stop deceiving yourself. When somebody criticizes your leadership, it is all too easy to respond by trying to justify your actions and actively try to turn the criticism into praise. If you focus on the feeling of being misunderstood or misjudged, you will place yourself right into the position of defensiveness instead of listening openly. You will be tempted to highlight your achievements, point out how successful your projects are, and how people have rewarded your leadership prowess. At the same time, you might even be tempted to make comparisons with others and point out their failings in comparison with your achievements. Unfortunately, all of these reactions are defensive rather than expansive and mindful Use criticism as a means for improving. Criticism is leveled at leaders for various reasons, with the main one being that people perceive something isnt working to their benefit or for the greater good of something everyone has a stake in. When people feel powerless to initiate change and innovation themselves, the leader is the sensible target for expressing their discontent. First, work out why those youre in charge of might be feeling this way and try to remedy it so that they feel they have a greater ability to innovate, participate in developing solutions, and initiate changes. Second, reflect over the criticism. Often there is the germ of accuracy in even the most negative criticism and if you can pull out something positive from this, it serves not only you but your business, staff, team, community group, project, whatever it is youre leading, will benefit as well. Thank you Thistle
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:47:58 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015