5 Ways You’re Deceiving Yourself As A Leader

Coaching leaders and entrepreneurs to become better at leading, decision making, and growing their businesses is an incredible blessing to me!

While people ask me to coach them on a wide variety of topics, there are usually two main reasons:

Help them fix ______________

or

Give them experienced advice on questions they struggle to answer.

Quite often, I find many leaders were trained by…well…bad leaders. Therefore, they have bad belief systems in their own leadership.

With bad belief systems usually comes self-deception. The kind of deception that seems to make sense at the time, but when removed and inspected reveals the depth at which it holds one back from self or team progress and growth.

Here are five common ways leaders deceive themselves:

• It’s not about you – The most common deception I see, especially with entrepreneurs, is the belief that leadership is about them. Nothing could be further from the truth. By it’s very definition, leadership is getting people to follow you. That doesn’t happen when you’re a dictator. Sure, you can force them into doing what you want, but you’ll get half their productivity and absolutely zero loyalty.
• You’re not the only smart one – Being the one with all the ideas is not only tiring, but it’s also defeating the purpose. A great leader hires people who are smarter than they are. A scared leader doesn’t. You should be taxing the collective intelligence for two reasons – God didn’t give you all the great ideas, and when you foster your teams input, you gain respect, buy-in, loyalty, and ownership.
• You can’t hide your faults – You have faults, embrace that understanding. So many leaders that I’ve met through the years believe they can hide their faults from their team. The funny/sad thing is they already know your faults. They see them because they spend more time working with you than anything else they do. Thinking you can hide your faults everyone is not only ridiculous, but it’s unnecessary. Lose any pride or ego, be aware of your weaknesses, and don’t hide them. Instead, hire people who are strong where you are weak.
• Conflict will work itself out – Whooooamagosh no it won’t! Let’s be honest, no great leader likes drama. But you have these emotional things in your business called people. And most of them don’t truly understand how to communicate with each other, which is why we have little conflicts that turn into really big ones if a leader doesn’t fix them. Get on it! And while you’re at it, have your people take their DISC already! Geez! It’ll change your whole company.
• I don’t bring my personal life to work – Bah! Probably the biggest self-deception of all. While you think you’re leaving your personal stuff at home, you’re actually bringing most, if not all, of it to work with you. You see, we make decisions based on our past and our influencers. Recently, I did a podcast called Understanding Your Root System where I explain how we bring so much of our parents, teachers, leaders, etc. into our business because we have NO CLUE how much they’ve influenced us. That means the good and the bad. If you’ve heard anything about the Next-Level Life events that we do, then you’ve heard how powerful understanding this is.

The most important part of being a strong leader is knowing your weaknesses. You can’t do that if you’re not getting the truth, especially if it’s not coming from you.

Question: How have you deceived yourself?