You Can't Be A Leader If You Can #DIY – Thoughts

Whether you realize it or not, most of us strive to become leaders. We want to do something great, be respected by our peers, make more money and acquire more responsibility. Overall, we want to make a difference at our job.

But most of us simply don’t know the proper way to gain that heightened respect, confidence and admiration from our colleagues, mainly because we don’t know how to lead others, but know how to do it ourselves.

The acronym DIY means Do It Yourself.

As far as I know leaders who lead others have specific skills and abilities that most DIY people don’t have.

DIYs have no delegation skills, they are always doing things by themselves even if it is for the better of the better of the team or company.

They have no interpersonal skills which most leaders are supposed to have.

Leaders know the skills, strengths and weaknesses of the people they are leading because that is how they know who to assign which task, while DIYs have no time to assigning because they can do it.

DIYs have the ‘I know it all’ attitude and no one wants to be lead by such a person. ‘After all you can do it then why assign it to me’, will be the followers’ attitude.

Leadership is not a DIY thing you need others to lead. People often perceive leadership as being about the individual rather than the team. You hear about the scorer who saved the game, but you don’t hear about the rest of the team. If that person was alone he wouldn’t have done it.

This mythos that to lead means to embody everything we see as the essence of individuality: to be the ultimate hero, powerful and alone.

No one does anything alone. The greatest scientific discoveries were only made possible by those who had gone before.

As Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Only a fool would walk alone into the line of fire and survive.

Great business executives have help from hundreds, thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands of employees working hard to make everything happen.

Patricia Kahill

Patricia Kahill is a multipotentialite Christian entrepreneur, Content Marketing Coach and founder of the Content Marketing agency, Kahill Insights that helps business owners create engaging and interactive content items for digital platforms with a focus on returning a desired outcome. Patricia was the producer of SlamDunk Basketball Talk a show on House of Talent online TV, a former fellow at Harvest Institute for leadership and now an assessor there, and an alumnus of the YELP class of 2017. A member of the BNI Integrity chapter and African Women Entrepreneur Cooperative. She is driven by passion and curiosity, been taking every opportunity that has been given to her with an ambition of stamping her footprint on the world.