The Goal of Leadership – Keep Everyone Happy

Planning for important family get-togethers, like Christmas, is often a case of ensuring the process is done in such a way that everyone is happy with the general and specific arrangements. A key to this is obviously effective communications, including keeping an ear out for intentions i.e. effective listening and responding.

Somebody said to me recently that it’s impossible to keep people happy all the time, or even keep most of the people happy most of the time.

But this is essentially the challenge of leadership: to keep everyone happy, as far as possible. This is where the leader, be it in the family, in business, or in sport, needs to be an effective negotiator, serving both the people and the broader interests of the family, business, or team being led.

In leadership, there are always non-negotiable’s that must be met. In business, there are key performance indicators that dictate our focus. In sport, we need to win as much as possible. In the family, we must ensure we lead responsibly particularly in two areas--the marriage, and with the children. Leadership is about realising potential.

Keeping everyone happy is the overall goal of leadership because there’s nothing like achieving the broader goals and seeing everyone delighted, to boot.

At times keeping everyone happy will mean setting aside our own personal agendas, desires and plans; again, the effective leader doesn’t mind how things are done so long as the overall objectives are being achieved, right? (Getting to this place mentally and emotionally is a journey itself, and perhaps it’s a journey we never truly complete.)

Leadership done this way means there is freedom for team members (incl. family members if we’re talking leadership in the family) and other stakeholders to contribute uniquely, and ownership and commitment to the process and outcomes is then almost a given.

Keeping everyone happy (as far as is possible--and it isn’t always possible) is the role of ‘servant leadership,’ which is a construct from Christian ministry leadership that works equally well in secular, sporting and family circles.

It’s about ‘leading lightly.’ Holding control lightly is a key to relationships, communication and leadership.

Copyright © 2008, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.