Thoughts about Being a Leader

Here are some random thoughts of recent inspirations, for my own tips about being a leader.

• Never confusing people by acting as both consultant and manager. People get confused when they use a manager as a consultant, since they can hardly tell which instruction comes from the person with consultant hat (suggestions), or from the person with manager hat (an order). When combined with the two, people will ignore your “must” list, or take your suggestions too seriously. The best way to do is, do not try to be a consultant, although you can.

• Use your knowledge as a way to set goal, instead of help people doing it. This is similiar to my first point. Being able to do it myself is good, but don’t try to do it, or even try too hard to tell people how to do it. Use knowledge as a powerful tool to set reasonable, clear, complete, actionable, specifcm, messurable, time-bound goals, instead of going into details to tell people what to do. If you do check all the details, you get frustrated, and your team is frustrated, and they tend to rely on your decisions, which is bad for an organization.

• Don’t be a working place and a training center at the same time. Training center is about changing a person, or improving a person, or empower a person. Company is all about making things happen with the right human resources. So the company’s goal is to select the right person, instead of creating the right person. If the chemistry between a person and a company does not match, the best thing to do is to find a better match, for both the company and the person, instead of changing a person, or even harder, to change a company.