Leadership Originates From Care

(Credits: the feature image is from azquotes.com)

The most important thing in good leadership is truly caring.

– Dean Smith

Knowing the origin of leadership gives you deep understanding of it and helps you be more effective in developing leadership in yourself.

For a while, I’ve been chewing on the quote above and trying to grasp the deeper connection between leadership and care. I did introspection on the things I did in the past where I played leadership role either consciously or unconsciously. Dots started to connect. These are different layers of the connection.

Leadership Originates From Care About Excellence

When you care about excellence and do the best possible, you get strong motivation to go extra miles and enjoy the satisfaction from when you make forward progress and become better and better. It’s only a matter of time before you stand out and people around you start to follow you.

For example, back when I was in high school, I craved for being able to speak fluent English. However, the education system at the time only focused on reading and writing in preparation for college entrance exams. So I went round the city and went to any “English Corner” (college students’ small social gatherings to practice conversation in English) I can find and talk with college students in English and practice. Later, I organized an “English Corner” within my school and many students followed and joined. To me this was a leadership moment by accident. However, I found its origin now – the care about excellence.

Leadership Originates From Care About Causes

When you care about the success of a cause, you start to elevate from your own scope of assigned role. Instead of only focusing on your work at hand, you are looking at the bigger picture. Your scope of thinking and influence will expand naturally. You are more comfortable about ambiguity and stepping outside your comfort zone. You will gradually become a strong influencer of the cause’s direction and people in the cause. Leadership by influence naturally arises. The pitfall is “taking on additional responsibility for the sake of taking on additional responsibilities without the care about the cause”. You won’t go far.

For example, when I worked on a new innovative product as a senior engineer, I had strong intrinsic motivation to navigate through much ambiguity and ship the cool product. There was no designation of tech lead, because there were a few senior engineers on the project. The care about the success of the project gave me the extra power to not only play an influential tech lead role driving the technical direction, but also a strong product manager partner role because I contributed significant amount on product framing, design, and even marketing.

Leadership Originates From Care About People

Beyond causes, the deepest care is about people. Ultimately, all causes are for people. So without people, the causes, the projects, and the products we build are meaningless. When you have the deep care about people and all the stakeholders, you have a whole new level of perspective. Zero-sum games often times become win-win. As a result, you are more effective in solving hard problems (both technical and non-technical) and have more influence in a good way because people understand you are for the good for all the people instead of yourself.

During my years of being tech lead at work and teaching during my spare time, I felt how meaningful the help I provide to others. With this deep feeling and realization, the care about people went from being unconscious to being conscious and went from the back stage to the front stage. This is one of the main factors for me to choose engineering management career path, because I get the best of all worlds, i.e., fulfilling my care for people, causes, and engineering excellence.

Conclusion

It’s a journey to find your care. I’m enjoying the introspection. Now, marching on connecting one dot at a time.