Some important principles of leadership:

1. Always, when leaders say that the people are not following, it’s the leaders who are lost, not the people.
2. Leaders get lost because of isolation, delusion, arrogance, plain stupidity, etc., but above all because they become obsessed with imposing their authority, instead of truly leading.
3. Incidentally, leading is helping people achieve a shared vision, not telling people what to do.
4. It is not possible for a leader to understand and lead people when the leader’s head is high in the clouds or stuck firmly up his backside.
5. That is to say – loyalty to leadership relies on the leader having a connection with and understanding of people’s needs and wishes and possibilities. Solutions to leadership challenges do not lie in the leader’s needs and wishes. Leadership solutions lie in the needs and wishes of the followers.
6. The suggestion that loyalty and a following can be built by simply asking or forcing people to be loyal is not any basis for effective leadership.
7. Prior to expecting anyone to follow, a leader first needs to demonstrate a vision and values worthy of a following.
8. A given type of leadership inevitably attracts the same type of followers. Put another way, a leadership cannot behave in any way that it asks its people not to.
9. In other words, for people to embrace and follow modern compassionate, honest, ethical, peaceful, and fair principles, they must see these qualities demonstrated by their leadership.
10. People are a lot cleverer than most leaders think.
11. People have a much keener sense of truth than most leaders think.
12. People quickly lose faith in a leader who behaves as if points 10 and 11 do not exist.
13. People generally have the answers which elude the leaders – they just have better things to do than help the leader to lead – like getting on with their own lives.
14. A leadership which screws up in a big way should come clean and admit their errors. People will generally forgive mistakes but they do not tolerate being treated like idiots by leaders.
15. And on the question of mistakes, a mistake is an opportunity to be better, and to show remorse and a lesson learned. This is how civilisation progresses.
16. A leader should be brave enough to talk when lesser people want to fight. Anyone can resort to threats and aggression. Being aggressive is not leading. It might have been a couple of thousand years ago, but it’s not now. The nature of humankind and civilisation is to become more civilised. Leaders should enable not obstruct this process.

Yesterday I posted on Team Building, I mentioned in that post that I’ll post about the tasks one by one later. So here I am with the first task for my Team Building workshop.

This task is named “Rabbit, Archer or Wall”

- In this there are two teams.

- Each team has to choose the character they want to be they can either be Rabbit or Archer or Wall

- All the team members have to be same character, so the character has to be told to everyone in the team. The team here decides what they want to be.

- Both teams are given 30 seconds to decide who they are.

- After 30 seconds both team face each other and do the respective action.

- For Rabbit action is “Hands on ear”, for Archer the action is “Archer releasing arrow”, and for Wall the action is both Hands with the palm facing the other team.

- When Rabbit comes in front of Archer – Archer wins (Archer kills Rabbit)

- When Rabbit comes in front of Wall – Rabbit wins (Rabbit jumps over Wall)

- When Wall comes in front of Archer – Wall wins (Wall falls on Archer)

In this you can have 5 iterations which yields you the result.

Things team learn in this task,

- Communicating the character (action) to all the members.

- Improved co-ordination among team members as all the members are told to do the same action.

- Improved understanding among team members.

- Chance for team members to place their opinion, get togerther and discuss what action to perform.

- Improves teamwork and team comes together to achieve success and win.

I’ll post the other two exercises that we had very soon. Keep checking.

Njoy