How To Make Leadership Less Lonely

If you ask a leader what his biggest struggle with is in leadership, you will often hear a single answer. Leadership is lonely. I have no one to go to with my leadership struggles.

It’s a fact of life that leadership can be lonely. Leaders can have a hard time finding a true friend whom they can confide and believe in. Especially because most of the leader’s time is spent with others within the organization.

Leadership doesn't have to be lonely. Group of friends hanging out

Photo by Omar Lopez

This isolation makes leadership lonely. Loneliness then makes leadership difficult.

But leadership doesn’t have to be lonely. You can have vibrant relationships from within and without your organization.

How To Make Leadership Less Lonely

We’re going to look at how you can make leadership less lonely. And that’s a good thing.

Managing Personal Relationships In The Workplace

Relationships Matter

While your family relationships may be the most important relationships in your life, your relationships with those you work with almost become equally important. Especially when you consider you may spend more time with your coworkers than you do with your wife or children.

Personal relationships in the workplace matter

Photo by Headway

This fact is daunting. Forty-plus hours a week are spent with people in your office. That’s almost a quarter of your week.

What this means is the relationships at work often become personal relationships on top of the working relationships you have with your coworkers. These people become your friends, confidants, and, sometimes, your significant other.

Don’t tell me these relationships don’t matter. They do. And you have to learn how to manage those personal relationships in the workplace.

Quotes And Leadership Lessons From Rob Bell’s The Heretic

A Reel Leadership Article

The Heretic is an original documentary about the former pastor of Mars Hill, Rob Bell. Rob Bell rose to fame in West Michigan as he began preaching at Mars Hill church and started a series of short films that were spiritual reflections on life.

Leadership lessons from Rob Bell and The Heretic

Being from West Michigan, I was very interested in seeing the story of the once adored, and now often despised, Rob Bell. As his theology changed, the evangelical right began to shun him, the left began to accept and embrace Rob Bell. The story presented in The Heretic is interesting.

Watching Rob Bell, Pete Holmes, Kristen Bell, Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame), and others share their thoughts on faith and Bell’s journey was interesting. It was also depressing.

Creating Strong Family Relationships

Relationships Matter

If you were to ask someone what their most important relationship is, the answer would most likely revolve around a family member. My relationship with my wife is most important to me. My children are the most important people in my life. Or I love and cherish my parents.

But if you were to ask them how they’re creating strong family relationships, you’ll probably get a blank stare. They know their family relationships are important yet they’re struggling to build strong family ties because of everything else going on in their lives.

Family relationships are vital

Photo by Suzana Sousa

We’ve all seen the results of weak family relationships. Marriages crumble into divorce. Children hating their father or mother. Parents and children no longer on speaking terms. These situations happen even to those who claim their family is important to them.

How Leadership Is A Relationship

For many, thinking of leadership as a relationship is difficult. Too many people consider leadership a position, a role to play. Yet leadership is much more than the day to day activities you partake in to run your organization.

Leadership positions are positions of relationship

Let’s take a surface level look at the relationship between leadership and relationship and then dig deeper.

John Maxwell has a famous quote. Maxwell often says:

Leadership is influence —nothing more, nothing less.

When I frame leadership as influence, I begin to think about influence and what influence means.

What Is Influence?

This is a great question to ask. You need to realize what influence is before you can get into the meat of “Leadership is influence.”

A quick search for the definition of influence returns the following result:

Influence is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone…