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Meaning of Leadership

Define Leadership and we come with all those descriptions of the textbook which say a lot. A few which I can recall

• Leadership means taking responsibility for the whole team
• Leadership is letting the team enjoy the results and fruits while you take up the responsibilities and the pressures
• Leadership is also caring for the entire team.

It kinda makes you feel that leadership is a huge task and has a lot of demands attached to it. Maybe so and rightly so too, it is about leading and making a difference, standing up for a few standards and responsibilities and then making that statement count and add to the results.

As you know by now, we are huge fans of TED Talks and we have promoted some really good ones on our site in the Motivational Videos section. Continuing the trend, we talk about leadership today, in the plain words of Drew Dudley and we get to know why these people make it to the stage of such high honour as the Ted Talks. Surely leadership has a wide amount of dimensions and a lot of it in these lollipop moments as well.

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Drew Dudley and the Ted Talk

Before you click on the play button for this video, ask yourself a very simple question-

“What does leadership mean to you?”

I hope you have your answer in your mind and you are ready to watch this video. TED talk by Drew Dudley is unlike any other leadership talk, it’s short, funny and most importantly hits you with great thought.

Redefining leadership- Drew Dudley,

We have always associated leadership with the quantity of change it brings to society. While watching this video I could sense a major shift in my focus on topic. Drew Dudley catches us right, we consider the meaning of leadership as a vast difference in comparison with his meaning.

Another funny video I can recall about leadership is here – How to start a movement, being a leader

He says,

“Define leadership by lollipop moments- how many we create, how many of them we acknowledge, how many of them we pay for and how many of them we say thank you for.” 

He asks us to define it by the quality effect it brings rather than the quantity effect.

I am sure we all have that lollipop moments in our lives, the ones we have received and the ones we have given. Watching Drew’s talk made me realise how little we appreciate these leaders in our lives and the leaders we have been. Maybe we generalize them or maybe we just don’t notice at all. I guess the video speaks for itself and leadership in itself is not just a huge task, we not only follow the orders or supervisions of a leader but when we try and understand the difference they are trying to make and the transformation they are trying to achieve, I realize that we can be leaders in our own segments as well.

These are the leaders that try and refine our thought, these are the leaders that elevate us to a higher standard of life, these are the leaders that make us think that work is beyond just the physical presence – the leaders who make us not just do our work but go beyond that to create further lollipop moments, not just for us but for the team that is working with us, for the people who we are working for and the difference we create and I think appreciating such leaders is not just an act of courtesy but an act of acknowledgement and appreciation and telling them how much these acts have meant to us.

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Can you think of one such leader today?

Can you think of one such leader today, someone who has inspired you, someone who has made you think beyond what you perceive, someone who has cajoled you, driven you, pushed you and sometimes even pulled you to a higher standard. It need not be your boss, it need not be your supervisor, it can be as simple as your life partner, someone who has made you realize your potential and created those lollipop moments for you. It makes me feel so blessed that we have such people in our lives and I feel that feeling thankful is a great feeling in itself.

Today as I end this post, I end with a resolve to call one such leader who has made those small and big differences in me and tells him what it feels to have had that chance in life. Today I feel that we need to be a little generous in sharing our appreciation as well cos these leaders are so less in number and what they have done has really mattered. Taking the pride, I call one such leader today.

Who do you plan to call today, what are you planning to talk to them. Do them and us a little favour, and write about them here, we would love to honour such leaders on our site and we would love you to share this honour with them as well. Long live the leaders :)

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