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Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Leadership Development: How Fearless Are You?

How important is fearlessness to leadership? Well, very. Think for a minute about our American history. Consider the colonization of the new world, the American Revolution, the end of slavery, women’s suffrage, space exploration, and the civil rights movement. These critical turning points in our history wouldn’t have happened without the leadership of people who were fearless in their thinking and in their actions.

Certainly, their ideas and visions for the future were not mainstream. Their dreams were dismissed as ridiculous or impossible and were often shared in whispers for fear of retaliation and repression. The individuals who held these ideas and visions, though, could not hold back. They were driven by some internal need to explore new frontiers, and they had an uncommon courage to follow that drive.

How fearless are you? How important is fearlessness to your leadership? Few of us will ever need the type of courage our American pioneers had. But, as leaders at work, at home, in our schools, in our communities, we need a level of fearlessness that will enable us to speak up, to assert our preferences and choices, to give voice to our visions or causes, and to take action when it may not be a popular thing to do. We need a level of fearlessness that will allow us to be vulnerable, to tell the truth about ourselves, to set boundaries, to hold others accountable, and in other ways define our character.

Fearlessness is not for everyone, but it is an important element of leadership. Real leaders are able to put themselves out there by having uncomfortable conversations, making tough decisions, or taking a dreaded course of action. They know they will likely meet resistance and they have a pretty high tolerance for rejection and failure.

If you are feeling stuck in your leadership role, ask yourself if you are acting with enough courage. If you are feeling overly concerned with safety, peace keeping, what others think, and attending to the needs of those most resistant to change, then it might be time take a more fearless approach.