What’s your leadership cause

There are those managers who stand by watching to see what others will do before they act. Sure observing one’s environment is an important leadership skill. However, passivity leading to inaction is not leadership. Especially when action is necessary to improve, connect, move the ball down the field.

In the hasty pace that is corporate culture today, it’s easy for managers to be swallowed by busy work. Swallowed up in that frenzied pace is a sense of leadership identity.

It’s not just any identity. It’s an identity that stands on a foundation of purpose. That purpose is born of a cause. To have a leadership cause is to say you stand for something. To have a cause gives intention, purpose, laser-sharp focus.

No manager can stop the bullet train of corporate progress. However, it is not acceptable to blame busy work and avoid drawing a line in the sand to claim your leadership cause. If you need a cause to consider, here are some noteworthy possibilities

• Reversing work place misery
• Increasing workplace freedom
• Building workplace communities
• Building a talent management plan for your team

A cause gives rise to hope, to optimism. It’s a way out to something better. To have a leadership cause can signal to your employees that you have their back. But you know it’s more than that. Your leadership cause can be the thing to breath life into bleak corporate-doldrums. It can never be solely about employees. After all, you have results to produce. But wicked irony reveals to us that people are needed to create outputs.

Whatever the storyline is in your organization – unhappy employees, motivated employees, or somewhere in between – you claiming and proclaiming your leadership cause can be just what your employees and organization need. It’s time to get fired up. Define your cause.

 

Graphic by Shawn Murphy