I know that we tend to reserve resolution for the New Year but it's the day after Christmas, we have an ongoing pandemic and it's Sunday so just seems like a good day to reflect.
We don't live in a perfect world and if we are honest we never had a perfect leader. It would be impossible to please everyone and be a leader because a leader needs to make decisions and decisions mean there are multiple choices.
In making a decision you have a number of choices or leadership styles. One is to try to please the people who are nosiest or what I call the squeaky wheel approach. It might silence the wheel but if it dosn't fix the reason is got squeaky it will just keep happening. It is probably the easiest approach and can get you some short-term success. No one likes the squeak so doing something is usual popular. Of course, uninformed reactions have drawbacks. If you consider the actions we took after 9-11. Yes, we had some success, but we were involved in 20 years of war and the consequences still trouble us today.
The second choice is to consider the future impact of your decisions and make sure the immediate ones fit. The problem with that approach is deciding what the future should look like. This is where true leadership comes into play. For example, do we want better income equality? It may seems like of course we do, but some would argue that unbridles greed is the real motivator of progress. Much of the world's progress is related to the profit motive. If you take it away will progress stall? The answer is debatable and just based on what seems like common sense you don't want to totally eliminate it nor should it be unbridled. Is it OK to be a slum lord or use child labor?
Teaching that decision is important and selling the rest of us on your views is leadership.
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