How inspiring are you as a leader?

Straight up then: how inspiring are you as a leader?

Do you even know?

Television’s Dr Phil McGraw often asks guests getting some pop-psych on his Oprah offshoot program ‘Dr Phil’, 'How much fun are you to live with?'

It's a brilliant question that will put you in the shoes of your partner. But the same can apply to workplaces, organizations, teams, leaders and groups.

So how much fun are you to work for? Work with? Collaborate with? Communicate with? Do you even know? Do you need to have a chat to someone?

Think of it like a bellows that fuels a fire with air. At the historic re-enactment tourism village in regional Victoria, Australia, about 90 minutes from Melbourne, there’s a place called Sovereign Hill.

Here you can buy boiled sweets, watch people wear clothes of the pioneer days or get your name printed on a bushranger ‘WANTED’ poster. On a school-day visit in years gone by, I remember seeing the impact of the bellows at the town blacksmith. The Smithy would be operating the bellows using a foot-pump to stoke, feed and ‘air’ the fire and then he’d be tapping, belting and chinking out horseshoes and other historic items of metal blacksmithing in between whooshes of air.

When you look at bellows, you see they have two actions:

• first they draw air IN ...
• before they can blow it OUT.

Do you give or take?

Are you the sucking-air-in kind of person… squeezing the life out of; the one who brightens a room just by leaving it? Do you leave people deflated and flat, beaten and feeling hopeless? Do you even know? Oh how depressing! No no!

Rather… be the one who gives with (good) air and energy and possibility and hope. Make the environment, space, team, project and business feel fired up with air and energy because of you. Whooosh – blow fresh air and energy into the environment. Be inspiring! 

Be filled with possibility

When you’re leading change in a team or organisation, you have to fill the air and the environment with possibility and hope and ‘yes we can do this.’ This is not ‘yee-ha’ but rather a great feeling of capability, high likelihood and a sense of ‘we’re gonna do this because….’ and ‘we can do this because…’

If I followed you around for a week (not in a creepy way), what would I see? How inspiring are you as a leader?