Why should anyone be led by you?

It’s so hard to believe that tomorrow marks two weeks since I’ve finished 14 weeks of my Leadership & Team Building class at NYU.

The class honestly flew by. It was led by two instructors (genius idea because they had different work and social styles, but they complemented each other so well), who were both amazing contributors to our class. It has got to be one of the greatest classes I’ve ever taken (I really enjoyed Managing Inclusion & Cultural Diversity as well).

Todd Cherches, one of the instructors shared a PDF of a blog post he wrote which had 10 tough questions every self-aware leader needs to be able to answer.

So today’s post is going to answer one of those questions: “Why should anyone be led by you?”

It’s a great question because if you truly think about it and question why anyone would want to follow your lead, would you do things differently? And why? So what’s stopping you from doing that now?

We all took a few minutes to think about this in class via Zoom (it was our instructors’ first time doing half of the classes via Zoom due to current circumstances of Covid-19.

Once we had our response to the question, we (everyone in the class) read our explanation out loud. All we heard was a word or two of everyone speaking all at once.

After that, our professors broke us out into pairs to share our answers.

Then, everyone condensed their why into a sentence and shared with the class.

Why should anyone be led by you?

My answer: People should be led by me (Sylvia) because I’m constantly trying to improve myself. I’m upfront and aware of my strengths and weaknesses–I won’t pretend to know something I don’t. I’m honest with others regarding how I’m feeling and what I need help with–no need to act like I’m perfect at everything because I’m not and by being authentic about this, we establish trust. I value diversity in thought, backgrounds and am open to others disagreeing with me and my thoughts as long as they are voicing it respectfully and explaining why. I genuinely care about people as much as results and strive hard to make others feel heard and included, and provide guidance and resources to set others up for success, help others do their best work, and be the best versions of themselves whenever possible (and it’s always possible).

I’ll tackle some other questions in other posts – stay tuned!

I’m curious as to how you’d answer this question. Why should anyone be led by you?