How to be a Good Leader

Namaste Everyone!!

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This is my first article on Medium on how to be a leader. I have been reading articles on how to start as a beginner, and the gist was to write about your passion and not expect perfection on your first try. So now I would like to write something that my Mother taught me, a few untold rules that I have adhered to throughout my student life, and where I have seen great progress. Here are a few points that might appear to contradict the popular belief but, under some exceptional scenarios, are significantly proven to be useful.

Be a strong, confident, and independent Person to be a Good Leader:

A leader is one whom everyone can look up to; to be the ‘one’, you need to embrace your positives and work on your negatives. Your body language and gestures are critical in portraying your leadership abilities. Being assertive while taking crucial decisions is as important as being empathetic to people’s concerns. A leader should listen to people but have a filter/screen of truth to evaluate and take judicious decisions.

Speak to people only if they value your conversation and keep conversations professional:

This is a suggestion particularly suitable for student communities and clubs where some factors limit your abilities as a leader, and an already developed team has been assigned to you.

Ideally, a Leader should create an impact with his/her speech and is expected to have effective verbal communication with each member of the team. But when the team is non-cooperative and is pre notioned and as a Club lead you are limited by some external factors due to which you cannot exercise your complete charge it turns into a herculean task for you to delegate work and check their progress. Under such circumstances, the best thing you can do is to keep conversations with fellow members professional, create a report of everything and mark a copy to your higher authorities.

In some cases, for instance, the ones that I have experienced, Members show a higher interest in scrutinising the established guidelines in group discussions before implementation more often than materialising the work allotted to them. Though Listening to others is indeed an excellent quality every leader should possess, sometimes a redundancy of excessive discussions might lead to inefficiency in your work progress and failure in meeting deadlines. It depends on the intellect of the leader to differentiate the two.

Always take care of your mental and physical health:

Being a leader is not a cakewalk, and a good one who can create a vision, ensure that the team has been working towards it and empower them to unleash their potential requires a tremendous amount of persistence. At times there are a few situations where you will face negativity, overwhelming work and backlashes from internal and external sources, which should neither affect you mentally nor physically. Do have some “me time”, as I have mentioned in the first few points — you need to be a strong human, emotionally and physically, to be a leader.

Always find an opportunity in every adversity:

Optimism goes a long way. Leaders need it to keep the boat afloat under unforeseen situations.