Don't Panic

“Leadership is your ability to hide your panic from others.”
~ Laozi

Leadership involves making decisions that have an impact — sometimes a huge impact — on the lives of the people around you.

Because of this, people often lose sleep in leadership roles. Am I doing the right thing for my people? Should I be doing more? Is there something I should be doing that I’m not?

It’s important to continue to care — leaders who don’t care what happens to their people are either useless or dangerous.

The anxiety can be mitigated, though:

• Make sure you have a trusted group of people to vet your ideas. Ideally, they should be people who will tell you the truth, not give you empty flattery. Specifically ask people if they have any input or suggestions for making an idea better.

• Ask your people for their ideas, we all—you can’t think of everything.

• Kick the tires on any plan — what could go wrong? How can we keep that from happening? What can we do to fix things if it does go wrong?

• Be realistic in your expectations, which often means thinking about the range of outcomes. For example, we usually do “best and worst” budget planning for the year, so that we can keep things afloat in lean times and take advantage of good times. Knowing how you are not going to run out of money is really good for lowering a leader’s stress levels.

(image source: https://www.leadershipgeeks.com/50-funny-leadership-quotes/)