# Thinking about your leadership beliefs By:: [[Steven Denman]] 2023-06-15 There are many books, training, motivational posters, and documentaries (with emotionally-manipulative soundtracks) on leadership. So much so that I think people pick resources they like and skip over the most important step... thinking! In my recent reading, some books focus on particular aspects of leadership (e.g., active listening). These books attempt to distill main focuses (e.g., Radical Ownership by Jocko Willink), books that are a heuristic approach to every leadership idea (e.g., It Worked For Me by Colin Powell), and every other level and angle and hack. I look for morsels from all of these, but a more fundamental step is developing deeper beliefs about how people work, the purpose of work, and the function of leadership. These become the skeleton that the aspects of leadership attach to. Here are some not overthought, deeper leadership convictions: - Leadership is the stewardship and facilitation of people thriving and contributing to the success of a system (used generally to support various applications and levels of formal authority) - Leaders need to understand and distill a system, teach, and foster an environment that allows for progress and learning - Performance management by rating is stupid. Focus on hiring the right people who are motivated and skilled for the work that needs to be done and want to learn and improve the system (these people continuously improve the system and do not care about the number of their ratings!) - There is dignity in work as people accomplish tasks, learn, and improve. Focusing on learning and improving leads to more people being involved in micro-strategy and micro-innovations. #### Related Items [[Leadership]] [[Thinking]] [[Development]] [[Learning]] [[Beliefs]] [[Entertainment]]