Everyone’s been hurt by leaders who need to grow up.
Immature leaders always destroy relationships, hamper performance, and increase frustration.
Poor performance is often a matter of immaturity, not lack of knowledge.
Immature leaders:
- Drain energy. Parents with newborns are exhausted.
- Feel picked on, unappreciated, and misunderstood.
- Chase shiny objects and give up quickly.
- Love to prove they’re right.
- Don’t know what really matters.
- Love the spotlight. Won’t share.
- Throw tantrums when they don’t get their way.
- Don’t care what people think. They’re all about self-expression to the exclusion of others.
- Need to please and be liked. Success requires pleasing others in some way. But, the need to please destroys leadership.
- Can’t make the tough call and show compassion at the same time.
- Refuse to listen.
- Drift without focus and wander without direction.
- Become Inconsistent under stress and crumble under pressure.
- Succumb to peer-pressure.
- Trample on others.
- Believe comfort and ease are success.
7 ways to grow up:
- Press through the storm rather than running from it. Persistence during turbulence paves the path to maturity. Protecting people from turbulence prolongs immaturity.
- Believe you have something to offer. Mature leaders, like mature plants, provide sustenance for others and seeds for next year.
- Give yourself to something bigger than yourself. J. D. Salinger wrote, “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
- Stop talking about yourself all the time.
- Focus on action. If you can’t describe it in behavioral terms, you don’t know what you are talking about.
- Tell yourself you don’t know even when you think you do.
- Learn from mature leaders who display qualities you admire. Ask, “How did you develop _______?”
Which quality of an immature leader is most deadly?
How is maturity developed?
*This is the “I” installment of the dictionary for leaders.
What other words that begin with “I” relate to successful leadership?
