The Story
J. LaVarr Roberts |
Sincere leadership is my passion. I once worked for a talented man who wasn't a great leader. There was a lot of confusion among his direct reports, including me. One day I expressed my frustration and to my surprise I was asked to leave. I was angry for a long time at this man and his lack of leadership but then I started reading about leadership and dedicating myself to being a better leader and I discovered the problem was deeper than this one man. Leadership isn't an easy thing. In fact it may be the most difficult thing to do in the world. The surprising thing is that businesses, non-profits, communities, and organizations almost always place people in positions of leadership without giving them any training or direction. Somehow, people assume that by bestowing a title on someone that person suddenly becomes a leader.
The reality is that leadership takes a lot of effort. There is no clear list of to do's and there is no map that you can follow. Each situation and each leader is different which means the answers to the questions that leaders have are all as different as the leaders. I started my leadership journey with an awful lot of questions and I started reading. Then I got more questions. So I started reading a lot. A whole lot. Does reading a lot make you a good leader? Of course not. But what I discovered is that the wells of knowledge in books are deep. Many of people have gone through a lot of things and learned a great deal. Some of them were generous enough to put that knowledge into books to share them with us. Great leaders, brilliant minds, deep thinkers, they all share their wisdom and the price to pay for that knowledge is a little time and a few bucks. With little effort I have pulled some of the experience that took life times to gain into myself and made it my own. I have sat at the metaphorical feet of Lincoln, Churchill, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and many other leaders and learned from their mistakes and experience. I'm still learning but I get to build from their base and "see further than others... by standing upon the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton. I invite you to join me on the quest to become a better leader. I offer freely what I am learning in my personal leadership journey on this website and encourage you to drink deeply from the fountains of knowledge that are so freely available to us in our day and age. |