ARE YOU A LEADER?

ARE YOU A LEADER? (PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES).

Unemployment remains the news of the day. It seems that every time I open the newspaper or watch TV, there is more news about layoffs and consumer jitters. I have written in the past about management's need to be sensitive, open, and honest with their employees. Today, I want to focus on you, the individual, and what you need to do to be productive in the face of what can be overwhelming anxiety about your job and future employment. When businesses fail, they do so for a variety of reasons. One of the causes for failure is when the people in charge are satisfied with the status quo and do not anticipate or prepare for change. They believe that what is present today will be there tomorrow. For the individual, this kind of thinking can also lead to failure, particularly in the current business climate. For the individual caught in a tight job market, growing unemployment, and high personal expenses, a reluctance to change can lead to disaster. How can you motivate yourself to be proactive? What can you do to keep ahead of what is happening all around you? To answer this, let's discuss leadership. Just as we need sound leadership in our business, we need strong individual leadership for ourselves. The same qualities that make for strong leaders of an organization are those we need to have in our personal lives: Leadership gives us renewed confidence in our ability to find the answers in times of crisis.

Leadership helps us face crisis in a stable, thoughtful fashion. Leadership gives optimism in the face of pessimism. Leadership gives us reality. Leadership gives us our future. If you look at those statements and direct them to yourself, you will begin to discover the necessary qualities and behaviors that will help you manage your own personal pressures and allow you to govern yourself in times of stress. People who are going to weather the anxiety existing in most companies today will address the above statements one by one and ask themselves how they measure up in those areas. Are you an effective leader of yourself? Do you have the confidence to face the possibility of your firm announcing layoffs? If this occurs, have you differentiated yourself so that you are a vital and significant member of the team? Have you developed those skills that will allow you to seek successful employment elsewhere in the event you are laid off? If you feel your resources are thin, what are you doing to enhance them? Do you have a strategy in place that allows you to stay productive both at work and at home? Let's hope you're not just burying your head in the sand, hoping the unemployment ax won't fall on you. Withdrawing at work, thinking that invisibility will confer safety in the event of crisis is not a good tactic. You can't simply push the possibility of job loss out of your mind because it is too painful to contemplate. Nor can you wait for others to bolster your confidence. It's up to you to do something substantive to lower your anxiety. It's also an appropriate time to discuss with your family the possibility of unemployment because you should have a plan in place in the event of a layoff or company closing. For people who lack self-confidence, the need to change can be perceived as riskier than moving in directions that may seem strange and unpredictable. The comfort of routine can be lulling and enjoyable. To think that what you have today will be here tomorrow, while giving a sense of security, can be falsely optimistic in light of the reality of the times. And your ability to take on the qualities of leadership may be the difference in your ability to outlast the crisis. Companies that bury their heads in the sand, not taking note of what is happening around them, are setting themselves up for failure. They usually court disaster by thinking that they will be successful forever without contemplating

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