How to choose your leaders

# Chapter 189

Choose your leaders based on their abilities and strengths not based on your friendships and connections. This is another Lincolnism. President Lincoln did this well. For some reason we find this very hard to do. I find myself and most everyone I know doing the precise opposite of this. The first people we look to are those that we are connected to and that are our buds. Nary a thought to their skills or abilities to get the tasks completed, but only that we “trust them” or some nonsense such as that. And we make poor leadership decisions because we aren’t willing to take the risks of hiring and/or placing the right people in the right seats on the bus that we are driving. Thus we never reap any of the rewards that could and would come from such minor risks.

Instead we prefer the misogynistic and nepotistic practices of putting our buds in the positions of impact that we control. We oughta be ashamed of ourselves for such poor leadership and development of the people and organizations that we lead. I need to make some board changes and you might need to make some personnel changes and we both are cognizant of the fact that changes are needed! More importantly this is an admonition of preventative medicine rather than corrective medicine, and that should shame us as well. We were afraid or insecure earlier in our leadership journeys and now we need to stand up straight and take the responsibility that we should have been showing all along. This is what makes for strong and growing organizations and people, not putting people into positions that they have neither the ability nor talent to accomplish - which means each and every time that these important tasks never get done ever.