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Advice For Leaders

Col. Chris Hadfield  |   | 
 
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The real key is initially to become competent. No one’s going to respect an incompetent leader. The area’s that are within your purview that you have time to prepare for that other people are going to have to trust your judgment on; you must be competent in those areas to the absolute the ground floor, the platform upon which leadership has to be based as competence.

And then after that is communication - you have to having been competent recognize a goal that you’re after then you need to be able to communicate to the people, give them an overarching objective so that they understand where we’re all headed. You don’t have to tell them: turn left, turn right, turn left, turn right, but you need to tell them we’re trying to get over there and that’s the real key to giving them an overarching objective, but then listening to them.

Everybody’s going to have an idea that you did not and a lot of them are going to be better than your first ideas taken. So the first is competence, the second is communication and then the very last is persistence. It’s like a shepherd with a whole bunch of sheep and you need to get everybody into the kennel or get everybody out to the grazing field. It’s no good just having a good idea and having everything going that way you need to constantly keep nudging things, looking and watching for strays and thinking about how it’s going to decide if we need to get there faster or slower - it’s a constant iterative, interactive process and worth re addressing constantly and looking at yourself and making sure that you’re getting closer to the objective that you want and then finally when you get there that’s just the net step. That’s not victory, that’s not the end anything, leadership is really just getting through one particular sequence of gates so that you’re better prepared to get to where you have to go after that.

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