3 Strategies for Projecting Success and Confidence as a Leader A leader's job is to step into everyone's shoes and find ways to make the path less treacherous, stressful and demoralizing.
By Rehan Ijaz Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
This article is included in Entrepreneur Voices on Effective Leadership, a new book containing insights from more than 20 contributors, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders.
An old friend called me yesterday and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn about where his life was taking him. During the discussion, he commented, "I can't believe the idiots I have to put up with at the office." It is easy to dismiss people around you, or beneath you on the corporate scale, as incompetent, but I've realized that everyone else's job always looks easier and less stressful, until you walk a mile in their shoes.
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Here are three keys to building that understanding and leading more effectively.
1. Develop the heart of a servant.
As a leader, this is incredibly important to understand. Your job is to step into everyone's shoes and find ways to make the path less treacherous, stressful and demoralizing. A leader is in service to those around them; and the best ones do this so consistently, that their team takes it for granted.
Serving your team's needs, without losing your status as their boss is a balancing act. The key counter-balance to being a servant is the projection of confidence. Well-established confidence in one's self is the perfect pairing for the heart of a servant. But how can a leader project confidence, even when they're having a bad day?
Related: 12 Lessons Tony Robbins Taught Me About Entrepreneurship
2. Physical fitness and presence are important.
I've heard some of my colleagues lament the fact that "young and energetic" is sometimes outweighing experience when opportunities come up to climb the corporate ladder. Balancing the workplace generation gap is a challenge, and when it comes time for a promotion, the image of the company can hang in the balance.
But there's one thing every entrepreneur and corporate leader can do to negate the advantages of youth: stay fit! Thanks to the plethora of knowledge the human race has collected on health and wellness, it's possible to look fit and trim at any age. More than youth, physical fitness and presence is really what is valued by a company worried about the image of their team to the outside world. Don't let a date on a birth certificate define you.
3. Over-prepare in private.
There are few things more frustrating than working for a leader that has little grasp of the facts, or reality surrounding a decision. A great leader takes the counsel of his team but has invested the time and energy to educate themselves on the situation as well. Counsel should be centered around providing a different perspective, instead of a start-to-finish education on the problem.
Confident leaders serve their team best by being well-informed, current and aggressively prepared. Robert Pagliarini shared some insights on productive meetings in this CBS Money Watch article. Spoiler alert: preparation is a key component to experiencing a favorable outcome. If you understand what you want, and have done the research to provide a foundation of facts, you can better nudge the conversation in a direction that leads to the outcome you're looking for.
The best salespeople, team leaders and negotiators don't worry about who does the most talking. They worry more about the direction of the conversation. After all, if the conversation is headed in a direction that leads to your desired outcome, does it really matter who does the talking?
A confident leader understands the value of preparation and uses their depth of knowledge to steer the conversation. In the end, the participants feel ownership in the final decision, even if it was different from their original intention.
"People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private." -- Tony Robbins
Great leaders commit to being amazing long before the meeting or the moment where their confident leadership is needed. They spend long hours in the gym, in the office studying and developing the habit of serving those around them. The confidence that is projected in the moment is the result of hard work in private.
