IS LEADERSHIP WITHOUT A TEAM POSSIBLE?

Leadership is essentially your ability to ‘lead’ a team successfully before moving on to lead the next bigger team.

Leadership is usually associated with one who needs to “Lead” a team or be able to “Stand Out” among the rest and be assigned as one.

Every ‘rise’ in the career is seen as a progression of leading an increasing ‘number’ of people in a team. With a few exceptions, this is largely true as a generic assumption. So, leadership is essentially your ability to ‘lead’ a team successfully before moving on to lead the next bigger team.

I am going to ask you to take a step back from this assumption and take a closer look at ‘one-self’ – the inner leader in many ways. Before you exercised your leadership role as an action to establish your leadership, didn’t the ‘thought’ of that action precede in your mind before the execution of action? In other words, have you noticed that before displaying your ‘leadership qualities’ to lead a team depending on the situation, it’s your ‘leadership thought’ that precedes ‘leadership action’?

Which brings us to the point that you need to be a leader ‘yourself’ first - before applying leadership on people around you. So, it follows that you are a leader first in thought within yourself. Applying that leadership thought on the team is secondary. Hence, for a great leadership thought - you don’t need a team in the first place!!

I am sure the above statement will thrill the independent Architects of the IT world, the sole entrepreneurs and the artists of the creative world – you can be a leader without a team!!

The point I am driving at is that there is far more leadership in you as an individual. There is a huge scope to polish this leadership in you before you think of applying it on yourself and others. This line of thought encourages you to be your own leader in self-discipline, in taking responsibility for your words and action. It gives you self-inspiration in geometric proportion to enhance your leadership thoughts. Actions that follow an inspirational thought is usually a great outcome.