My 7 Maxims of Inspirational Leadership
Here are 7 maxims of inspirational leadership that I teach veterinary leaders how to embrace and embody in order to serve powerfully:
- What’s in the way is the way.
Life has its way of bringing you challenges that are uniquely designed for you; challenges that stir up thoughts, feelings, and emotions, that you would much prefer stay buried. “What’s in the way is the way” means whatever challenge you’re faced with is meant for you, and you’re being invited to face it and move through it.
The obstacles you face in your leadership role act as triggers to prompt further growth. They are signposts towards a greater version of you.
- Be the change you want to see.
If you want to create change in your practice, you have to embody the change within yourself first. To drive change among those around you is not just about promoting your ideas but demonstrating them too. People need to buy into the changes you’re advocating.
- You are your leadership, and your leadership is you.
Who you are as a leader is influenced by who you are everywhere else in your life. Your beliefs and values shape who you are, and your beliefs and values are shaped by your early life and work experiences. This directly impacts how you show up and how you serve others. You can’t escape it; your leadership is YOU.
- Your team is a reflection of you.
Our outer worlds reflect our inner worlds, so how we experience our external environment and the people within it is directly impacted by our inner landscape. Similarly, if something is happening in your team that you want to correct, start with yourself first. Where do you express that habit or behaviour in your own life? Correct it and heal it there first, and you’ll magically experience a new external reality.
- Leadership is not about you, yet it’s all about you.
Your responsibility as a leader is to help people develop and thrive. But to do that, you have to be consistently working on yourself too. This means assessing your beliefs, behaviours, habits, and thinking patterns, to identify those that limit you and therefore limit those around you too. Leadership is not about you, yet it’s all about you, because it STARTS with you.
- Growth is a spiral not a cycle.
You are constantly growing in a leadership role, and during that growth journey you can often revisit old “stuff” that you thought you had previously worked through. It can feel incredibly frustrating, and people can sometimes be really hard on themselves for not being “over it” yet. Growth is a spiral because you are often brought back to old triggers to remove another layer and experience a deeper truth of them.
- You are responsible for creating more leaders, not more followers.
Leadership isn’t about being in the spotlight, and ego can get in the way of getting the most out of your people. If your leadership aim is to create followers, you’ll find you have a team with low initiative and creative thinking, who rely far too much on you for the smallest of decisions, and you’ll be overwhelmed, and sucked into trivial matters. Creating leaders means you’ll have a far more effective, and productive team, your practice will run more smoothly, you won’t have to be involved in absolutely everything that happens in the practice and can spend more time on higher value leadership responsibilities. You are also creating the leaders of the future; that’s powerful work!
If you’ve read my 7 Maxims of Inspirational Leadership today and thought, “I could definitely do better in some of these areas”, then book a consultation with me to discuss how we can move you up the Scale of Inspiration.
Book a consultation here: https://go.oncehub.com/simplyveterinarycoaching-freeconsultation
