Office Politics
Working Environment
Pay Rises and Money
Personal Development
Confidence
Promotion
Productivity & Personal Skills
Stress
Banishing Accidental Leadership Syndrome: 7 tips
Women make great leaders but, unlike their male counterparts, many fall short of acknowledging that their success is down to their own efforts. Here's 7 tips on how to lead and succeed. Get your own plan together together and go for it full throttle.
People were shocked to hear a professor at a major university, a very gifted and beautiful woman, confess how she became a voice of authority in her field. 'I did it the way women generally get places - by accident. I walked into the university one day and found out there was a place available on the History of Science course. So I took it. When I wrote my dissertation, my supervisor told me it was good enough to turn into a book. I hadn't a clue that it was any good: he had to tell me.'
But was she happy with the results? She admitted that her male colleagues had achieved much greater success than her. She said she couldn't afford to teach if her husband didn't pay the bills.
Accidental leadership has its costs. You put in the same number of hours as everybody else, but without a clear goal in mind, you may not get what you deserve.
Men are anything but casual about their careers. Just take a look at the titles of these business bestsellers, written by men:
- Control Your Own Destiny
- Only the Paranoid Survive
- Taking Charge
Every one of these books is about pursuing success with determination and clear intention. Whereas the drift in women's lives towards 'accidental leadership' shows that too often even strong women aren't doing themselves any favours.
Each of us falls into this pattern at critical times in our lives when we treat ourselves as if our accomplishments have come by accident. We stop trusting ourselves. We stop thinking that we are talented and effective. We wait for people to tell us how good we are.
Worst of all, we let others make decisions about our lives, about what we should do and where we should live. Having other people make decisions is comforting. Former slave and African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth once tried to sell herself back into slavery because she found herself afraid to make decisions about her life. As Dante put it, hell is reserved for people who don't make clear and passionate choices. They are the ones who never give themselves a chance to find work that they really love.
They are the ones who don't dare to live at the peak of their potential.
But how do you do that? Here are Seven tips to break out of the Accidental Leader Syndrome.
1 | 2 | next
printer friendly
send to a friend
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Horoscopes| Message Boards | Quizzes | Newsletters | Join
iVillage Ltd is a UK company registered in England & Wales (3837269) at 80-110 New Oxford Street, London WC1 1HB
