5 Leadership Mistakes That Are Preventing You From Being Inspirational

Here are 5 mistakes I see veterinary leaders making that are limiting their leadership impact and preventing them from taking the leap from good, to great, to inspirational:

1. Trying to be everything to everyone

In action, this is someone running around doing busy work, fighting small fires, reacting instead of being proactive, and constantly getting sucked into the day to day work rather than being ON the business. All of these behaviours reduce your time for offline thinking and limit your creativity.

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2. Making it about you

Leadership is not about putting yourself in the spotlight, it’s about BEING the spotlight.

In action, this is someone who takes things too personally, or leads with their own interests as priority instead of the interest of the team.

Leadership is not about you. (But it’s also ALL about you – here’s why).

3. Saving instead of serving your people

In action, this is someone who helps their people with a problem by giving them the answer rather than coaching them through it, or worse - doing the task for them, which of course limits their learning and growth potential.

If you save instead of serve, you may take on too much as a leader through your efforts to help other people. This then leads to people relying on you too much and unconsciously expecting you to always be there and help them, which means they don’t have the opportunity to get creative and innovative themselves.

You become TOO important to your team.

4. Trying to manage time, instead of managing your energy

Many leaders are very good at overestimating what they can get done in a day. In action, this is someone “putting in the hours”, working late on evenings and weekends, hoping to get more done in the long run but ultimately just chasing their tail.

You can’t manage time as a resource. You can’t manipulate it or create more of it. But you can manage another resource which is energy. If you can manage your energy appropriately, then you can use it to be more efficient and effective in the time you have.

You may be interested in: You Don’t Need to Manage Your Time, You Need to Manage Your Energy 

5. Letting your past shape your leadership

Unless you know what biases you have that cloud the lens through which you see, experience, and interpret the world, you could be letting your past dictate who you are as a leader now.

How this happens depends on early life and work experiences that have formed beliefs within you about how you feel about yourself, others, and the world.

For example, if you are someone who has incredibly high (and potentially unattainable) expectations of your team, perhaps it is because you had incredibly career driven parents who instilled in you that anything less than 110% effort is unacceptable. You automatically expect the same from your team, but in reality that’s not how a leader operates to get the best out of their people.

If early work experiences taught you that leadership is about being in charge, exercising power, and giving out orders, then you might find yourself being inflexible in your leadership approach, perhaps not taking the opinions of others on board very easily.

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What's Next?

These missteps can be overcome by mastering the 5 Pillars of Inspirational Leadership:

1. Energy and Flow
2. Identity, Values, and Authenticity
3. Focus, Structure, and Accountability
4. Recruitment Game
5. Self-Mastery

Applications are now open to join the November 2022 Inspirational Veterinary Leader Revolution, where we’ll be mastering these 5 pillars of inspirational leadership together, utilising the power of a group coaching format which creates a unique sense of community, collaboration, and accountability. It’s a place to be vulnerable with like-minded leaders who truly understand what it takes to step up and achieve their mission, by growing themselves FIRST.