Well, just found this:
People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives. – Theodore Roosevelt
And looking at my own style I guess until now I’m more of a boss than a leader. And I promised myself to become a more inspiring leader and actually I also don’t want to be a boss. But then, if you’re a stubborn type of person who thinks he is often right and has his own way and who is kind of perfectionist and who indeed believes in delivering quality stuff, how would he achieve that?
Like now, the site, the project Inspiration for Success is not really moving and I think I did like 90% or more of the work. What could I do different to inspire the team, to make them move a bit faster? And yes, I read a lot about leadership and I guess most leaders are more of a ‘people person’ than I am. But still, I believe in things and I want to make them happen. And I often don’t understand why they are not happening as I think they could and should happen.
And yes, I see more of my part, of me not inspiring the team, inspiring people. But still, like in the case of Inspiration for Success I don’t fully understand while some of the team members signed up and then in the end hardly make time for the project.
And the biggest issue to solve is how to keep myself motivated if I have the feeling I have to do all or most of it alone. And I don’t really mind doing a lot of things, doing more than the average team member. But I see so much more opportunity for progress than is actually happening now and somehow I seem not to be able to pass that on to the team members.
But maybe indeed this is the whole thing about achieving success in the end. That successful people in the end somehow manage to get things done, to push through no matter what. And then finally somehow succeed. And that that would mean indeed that in the end, if I did a lot of work, persisted in doing things, persisted in continuing no matter how demotivated I was, that that indeed is the road to success. And that in the end that would somehow pay off in some kind of praise or people saying, yes, he did it, he is successful.
One of my biggest samples as of the moment is Tony Fernandes. And what I see now he did better, different than me is indeed finding a good leader to follow in his earlier career. And somehow he appears to have been successful in his career contrary to me. And he seems to be much more a people person than me. But what kind of bothers me is that I have kind of the same values. Like for my company I also wanted to provide good jobs for my employees. I wanted to do something for The Philippines, for the Filipino people by bringing relatively high quality jobs here with my web development company.
But somehow I didn’t succeed. Somehow I felt left alone by the people, mostly graduates who, after a short period of time, were looking for greener pasture in other companies and/or abroad. And this meant I couldn’t serve the customers properly as I couldn’t meet the quality requirements. And I could have spent some more time and effort on that and as of the moment I’m doing that. But I can’t do it all alone. So what does Tony Fernandes and what do other leaders different from me? As of the moment I still didn’t figure that out. Or is it indeed partly or for a great part about personality and character and (people) skills? But skills can be learned they say. And I think I tried, I did. But it just didn’t seem to stick.
Well, I see I’m complaining again or something. And I don’t mean to. But I think my intentions are and mostly have been good. And my belief is, or rather was, that intention is the most important thing, that ‘doing good’, ‘being a good person’ is the most important thing. But somehow it isn’t. Somehow attitude seems to be more important than intention or something. So well, yes, I guess I still have to learn more. As somehow I still intend to achieve success, the success I want.