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Let’s start from something fundamental. Stop thinking about leadership as a position but rather as a skill, a skill anyone can learn. People are not born with it, they learn it over time. Truth is, we’ve all displayed leadership more times than we can think, even when we were not in leadership positions. The time a friend needed a shirt and you gladly gave them one? The time a colleague needed a ride home and you were happy to oblige? The time your boss needed a report done but couldn’t get to it and you were excited to step in and do it on their behalf? These are examples of leadership and great leaders know how to identify and use these opportunities to align what they also want with what someone else needs to ensure a win-win situation, without making it so fundamentally obvious. The current proposition is that leadership is the absence of self interest, and these two; leadership and self-interest are two sides of the same coin. The absence of self-interest is the presence of leadership just as the absence of darkness is the presence of light. You don’t have to be a manager in your company to display leadership.
I recently posted a thought on LinkedIn and after I was asked a specific question, I thought let me write a post about this to really get into the nitty gritty of it and because there’s so many sides to it, I’ll continue to break it down in future posts.
The thought: “I think the way we hire people must change. Rather than putting out job posts with descriptions and allowing people to ‘tweak’ their CVs, we should invite potential candidates to tell us what they think the problems we are facing are and why we need a specific post to be filled. Let candidates synthesize the problem(s) and the solutions they would implement in that role!”
The question I got: “How were you recruited yourself?”
The art of problem solving involves a process of identifying the problem itself. The problem never comes to you and tells you, hey, I’m a problem, solve me! Like a doctor, you must diagnose the problem first to be able to recommend the best medicine to use to overcome it.
Why do people get employed? As a job seeker, you need to understand the why. If you’re already employed, you’d ask why do certain people command higher salaries than others?
Understanding the why puts you in a much better position to elevate yourself. If you’re seeking employment, an employer is not looking to employ you so they can pay you a salary. They employ you because they have a problem that needs a solution. That problem is their time. They don’t have the time to do everything in the business, time is the limiting factor. If they do not really know how to perform the function, they don’t have the time to go learn the skill because they need to focus on other problems. So, they would rather employ you, motivate you and pay you a salary to perform that function.
Majority of candidates I interact with all say; “I need a job to pay my bills, I need a job to learn new skills and better myself and so on”. This is always a self-interest approach and though it’s not wrong because you truly do need to better yourself and pay your bills, it misses the mark if what you’re looking for is getting ahead of your competition. The leadership approach which very few apply and hence are always in demand, say “I want that job to solve the problems of the company and it’s people.” The leadership approach forces you to work in the interest of your employer and as you solve more problems, you rise higher and are paid more. The shareholders have entrusted their business to the CEO and the rest of the board of directors. This management team always works to better the business; increase the bottom line and strengthen the balance sheet by looking for more opportunities and going after them, solving weaknesses and eliminating threats. Because of this, they are paid significantly more than everyone else. Once you understand and begin to apply the leadership approach, you’ll start to see changes and will also grasp how to command a higher pay, if already employed.
My response to the LinkedIn question: “After sending out so many CVs and not getting any luck, you realise you need to change your strategy and tactics – there’s a lot of competition amongst candidates, some more skilled than you and all sending out CVs. So you must devise different ways of getting ahead of the competition. My own was to connect with decision makers and research their companies. Who they are, what they stood for, what drives them – to assess if I would want to work with them. Then, once satisfied, I pitched my proposal of what I devised were the problems they were facing and how I could help solve them. Your own approach would be different. However, as an employer, you want talent and people who are driven, who want to work with you to move the vision forward. Whilst a CV lists your achievements, skills and experience, it doesn’t give insight into how you think, and what your take on solving problems is – which is what you’ll constantly be faced with in the role. There are some great candidates who are excluded at CV stage – so before you even get to the interviews, you need these submissions to give insight into how a candidate thinks and would solve problems, so the hiring is focused on who the best candidate is based on their ability to actually handle issues, not based on their CV which is edited to suit the role.”
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