When should you be Determined versus Flexible?

Folklore contains numerous sayings underpinning the idea that leadership needs to be firm, decisive and above all, resolute.

The myth goes that changing your mind is a sign of weakness and it leads to vacillation when you and a team are working to a set of objectives.

However, how valid is that model?

As any structured leadership training will confirm, much work needs to be done by way of analysis prior to an important decision being made. Decisions that are made in haste are frequently repented at leisure. Yet once all the analysis has been completed, sometimes a leader needs to make a decision and do everything in their power to help ensure that it proves to be the correct one.

It is true that leaders who suffer from constant crises of confidence will be inclined to keep changing their mind and that encourages others around them to wonder whether there is a firm hand on the tiller.

There is though, a significant danger in taking the ‘strong determined leadership’ stereotype too far.

One of the key attributes of a successful leader is also the ability to recognise that, in spite of all attempts to prevent it happening, a wrong decision has been made. This can sometimes be painful to accept and perhaps result in some personal reputation damage but it is essential to have the courage to recognise that a bad decision has been made and to take steps to correct it with the minimum impact possible on whatever the enterprise is.

Leaders who lack this attribute can become guilty of fixation and egoism to the extent that they are incapable of recognizing that they are leading things in the wrong direction. That’s sometimes best more plainly described as pig-headedness.

Sometimes a bad decision cannot be corrected by injecting more resource or more energy in to make it right. It simply has to be either reversed or a radically different decision made to replace it.

Being able to critically self-evaluate your own decisions and identify those that are not working out is a prime characteristic of mature leadership.

Read More

Leadership From the Front or in Splendid Isolation?

Some of us may have experienced what is sometimes derisorily referred to as ‘distance leadership’.


In the old days, this was manifest by the letter that was delivered from the boss or head office, effectively telling you what you had to do for the period ahead.

In more recent times that may have been replaced by the telegram, telephone, E mail and SMS but the same basic frustrations arise.  How can anyone you barely know and rarely see, possibly be trying to offer you leadership on a day-to-day basis through remote distant communications?

Of course, accusing a leader of being ‘out of touch’ is a comforting cop-out to sometimes help us avoid having to make decisions of our own.  Even so, it is widely accepted today as being a highly inefficient way of getting things done.

Modern leadership is all about participatory endeavor.  It’s about being part of a team and demonstrating leadership qualities through that team in terms of your personal behaviors and communication skills rather than through directives and orders.

In modern models, leadership isn’t about rank and hierarchy.  It’s all about your behaviors and the values you communicate through those.

This is an area that we at the Stars Institute of Learning and Leadership push hard.  It is particularly important for what some still call Aboriginal tribes’ development,as visible behaviors on a day-to-day basis are the best ways of promulgating increased confidence within the First Nations communities.

This is important because reading about leadership success in your community is one thing but it’s nowhere near as effective as being able to see real-life examples of it in practice.  Yes, theory and motivational techniques are important but personal example is even more so.

We don’t apologies for believing that the old models of leadership are now largely, though perhaps not exclusively, outmoded and inappropriate for present day Aboriginal peoples or indeed anybody else.

It isn’t easy to change views in this area because from birth many of us have it had drilled into us that we need to see leadership as being synonymous with parental, school, religious or legal system authority etc.

Our goal is to help you think differently and more broadly about what leadership is and how you can demonstrate it.

Read More