The 5 Beatitudes of Leadership

Here are some helpful hints to check your leadership pulse or grow as a leader. I would like to call them the leadership beatitudes.

Be teachable: A leader never gets to the place of knowing it all. As soon as you think that you know it all, you have stopped growing. When you stop growing, you start dying. Stay alive by being curious and insatiable for knowledge. It is a true saying: Knowledge is power; power to have what it takes when no one has answers, and there is never an end to the answers people need.

Be approachable: If people don’t come to you, you have no one to lead. Have an open door policy, and that doesn’t only mean for your employees, because true leadership goes beyond your place of work. When people seek you out for advice, help or ideas, and you are not even their boss at work, then you are a leader in your own right.

Be resilient: Everyone falls, but a leader always recovers and ploughs on, not just for himself, but also for those who are looking up to him for inspiration to get back on their feet. Being resilient is more than just getting back on one’s feet. It is bouncing back higher than the level from which one fell. It means when life knocks a leader down, he will get up and go higher and farther than most others. This is inspiring leadership.

Be prepared: I don’t mean this in a Boy Scout sense of the word. I mean, be optimistic and expect the best, but also be practical and be prepared for the worst at the same time. Being prepared brings with it a strength and levelheadedness in times of crises, that helps one cope when things don’t go as planned or go in the opposite direction as expected. A prepared leader stands tall when others are shocked, overwhelmed and paralyzed when life goes south!

Be there: This, for me, is the most important beatitude in leadership. Being available is a rare commodity in this day and age where the normal response to ‘How are you?’ is not ‘I am well’, but ‘I am busy’. When we are there for people, we demonstrate that they are important. No one has more time than anyone else. We are all given the same time. Leaders make time for people more than projects or things because people make up our world and at the end of our lives relationships will count infinitely more than the work or projects or businesses that gave us success in our lives. Being there for people contributes to significant leadership, and that’s the kind of leader I want to be.