Wednesday Wisdom: Leaders Lead from the Front

Today's Wednesday Wisdom is brought to you by Indra Books, founder of Agility for All. Do you have a question? Post it in the comments. 

Today's Wednesday Wisdom thoughts on leadership are brought to you compliments of a recent incident in our town government. It was discovered that the town had not been paying electric bills for several properties belonging to the town for three years. Further investigation yielded that they felt that someone had bypassed the electric meter and connected directly into the electric grid. 

There is a lot to unpack there, but a few things come to mind. Where were the quality checks? The town owns a host of properties. They weren't delinquent on all of them. Was there not a checklist of the services needed for each property? And an audit of the budgets and expenditures? So many questions on the administration of this issue. 

But this Wednesday Wisdom is not about quality controls and audits. It is about leadership. The response from the town hall was "we are looking into it. There seems to be an employee who we had fired twice and rehired who was at fault." Anyone else, hearing the screeching sound. 

But the mayor's response was even more vibrant. She declared loudly that she would get to the bottom of this and heads would roll when it was discovered what had happened. 

Does anyone else have a problem with this response? If you are the leader, who has responsibility in the organization when things go terribly wrong? Who has accountability for all the inner workings of the organization? 

Even if you are not directly involved, at the end of the day, you are the top person and you have to own what has happened. This comes back to what I always say. Good leaders surround themselves with people who are smarter than they are and create a culture that empowers them to lead. Poor leaders (or not even leaders) hire people who they can use as a scapegoat later. 

We work with organizations to create a culture of accountability, responsibility, and ownership all while creating safe and inclusive spaces when it's all going well and most definitely when it is not. 

Leaders have to lead from the front and be the example of what they want to see. It would have been okay to say that she didn't know what happened and would investigate and inform the town of the findings. But she took a defensive stance and set herself outside the problem. This is not how we build enduring persuasive leaders. 

 And that is today's Wednesday Wisdom. Don't forget that if you have a question post it below. Tune in next week for our next segment.

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