Leadership encompasses more than merely providing directions or holding a title. It entails creating positive and enduring change. Challenges are one of the perspectives that leadership is often discussed. People describe leaders in various ways and categorize them into different groups. Depending on individual understanding, expectations, and needs, people categorize leaders into categories like “bad,” “average,” and “exceptional.”
Despite the subjective categorization, some typical behaviors and expressions create the image of a leader, before placing him into one of the three categories. People expect bad leaders to be weak and toxic. On the other hand, average leaders are seen as those who make the effort, but cannot answer all the needs. And last but not least, the expectations for exceptional leaders reach new heights.
They must possess all the skills, knowledge, and capabilities to solve problems and improve people’s lives. It is as if the exceptional leaders are expected to have a set of “magical powers.” That solves the problems and creates meaning. However, after building expectations with magic, the exceptional leaders demonstrate behaviors that differ from those described. They are not endowed with all the answers. Exceptional leaders possess one other skill that many people lack or misunderstand. They know how to cultivate the ability to introspect and discover the strength necessary to guide others, while demonstrating values such as compassion and equity.
Exceptional leaders are those who, in the current highly dynamic world, can rapidly evolve the landscape by harnessing internal strength to foster sustainable leadership continually.
Below, in this short article, you can find outlined several fundamental challenges and respective strategies to overcome them while elevating internal strengths and leveraging inner resources to rebuild the current leadership presence and build on it to achieve heights within this area of impact on society and groups of people.
Challenge 1: Doubt and Fear of Failure.
This could manifest as hesitancy to implement a new strategy or fear of making a decision that could lead to failure.
The fear and doubt ensure no person. There are moments (and sometimes many moments in everyone’s life) when they feel vulnerable, weak, and hopeless. Even the most accomplished people and leaders experience moments of personal uncertainty. An overwhelming project may cause this, as well as unfamiliarity with something, or even just addressing a new audience, which can hinder progress. Nothing can guarantee that as an individual, the leader will be safe from these situations. And the more they arise, the more the leader struggles.
However, everything can be fixed, and a quick solution to the situation is available. The fix is in…
Building Self-Awareness and Courage
The more people convince themselves that they can’t do something, the closer it comes to reality. Few are those who say they can do it, meaning it, and are confident that they can do it. To start with, fighting doubt and thinking of failure, the individual needs to focus on something that sounds easy but is challenging to execute. This is about beginning to acknowledge personal strengths and accepting that they have areas for improvement, just like everyone else. Documenting fears may be the first step. And next to each fear, regardless of whether it is small or big, there should be a simple plan of action to help the individual progress toward overcoming that fear. On the other hand, courage is not about being fearless; it is about showing up when a person is ready for change, despite the fear, and with a focus on long-term improvement.
Challenge 2: Pressure to Please Everyone
An individual may feel confused and overwhelmed by trying to please everyone. It is that feeling that comes to say that people need your attention and involvement to make them feel better, and eventually, as a reciprocity, for them to like you. A person focused on pleasing everyone around is stressed by the confusion of ineffective decision making that may not deliver good emotions to the other side. The individual and the leader who embrace pleasing others as a behavior fear criticism regardless of the choices they make.
Pleasing everyone may become a significant struggle for the leader and all the other individuals involved. But it is like living a life that prioritizes the needs of others and losing yourself. A strong point to start fighting against that “ghost life” is to…
Embrace Freedom: Define Your Values and Purpose.
This is important because defining your values and purpose is equivalent to describing yourself and emphasizing your significance, rather than that of others. When core personal values guide personal actions, the individual’s and the leader’s action agenda becomes more manageable and steadfast in their decisions, regardless of the direction, agreement, or disagreement with others. And it forms personal value and a standpoint where authentic leadership evolves.
Challenge 3: Feeling Overwhelmed or Burned Out
According to a 2024 HBR research report exploring leadership struggles, burnout is the most significant outcome from the tight and overwhelming agenda that leaders report having. The energy and creativity of the leader are not limitless. Taking on more and more responsibilities and tasks to handle, and being constantly in an “alert stage,” drains leaders’ energy and weakens decisions and results based on them. This is an interesting phenomenon that many leaders reflect on too late. However, there is a direct way to deal with it and turn the challenge into a supportive bag of skills and an energy source. Now, this may sound somewhat basic and familiar to everyone, but according to research produced by Inc.com in 2024, fifty-six percent of leaders and more than sixty percent of their teams struggle with it. The magic here is in…
Learning to Practice Self-Management
Effectiveness, whether in leadership or any other area, begins when the individual can achieve balance. A common, yet often misunderstood and often used concept of effectiveness is the notion of work-life balance. Many people discuss it as a concept, yet only twenty-two percent of those who talk about it can truly master it. Achieving balance may not seem complicated, but it is a complex set of actions aimed at utilizing all resources. Breaks, scheduling, managing stress, you name it. However, all this requires precise planning and an effective strategy to turn words into real, impactful actions with positive consequences. Because, when caring for self-well-being, the individual, and in particular the leader, sets an exemplary model of how to deal with challenges. One of these challenges remains – leading others to confirm long-term wins by utilizing the capacity of the whole in a way that transforms words into a realistic, energy-fueled, and driven plan for success. Achieving this level saves the leader first and the team second from burning out in the chaotic environment.
Challenge 4: Conflict and Misunderstanding
Conflicts are not uncommon today. With the rise of the “I” over “We,” the developments that often occur may have a significant negative impact on relationships, collaboration, and even outcomes. A simple disagreement can easily escalate into an argument. A set of arguments often forms opinions and an intense personal fight against what is not like us. And this leads to tension within the teams we work with. To be successful, the leader needs to prevent escalations by nurturing and implementing various strategies to transform conflicts into winning behaviors and collaborative work toward a higher goal. How simple that sounds and how easy to implement. And unfortunately, so illusionary wrong. Because implementing balancing strategies to achieve results is the most challenging work, to be successful in it, the leader needs to work on…
Strengthening Communication and Empathy
In a rush environment, most people tend to listen to give an answer, defend themselves, and point to others as being wrong. On the other hand, a leader who wants to change that for good needs to prioritize listening over speaking. With the deepening of listening, the leader must develop the skills to recognize emotions within the speaker’s words and focus on working with them, rather than on what is said. The more a leader practices this, the more they develop a skill to distinguish between what is truly important and what merely appears to be so, as a means to defend themselves against those around them. And with a deeper understanding, the leader goes onto a stage of acknowledgement and creates space where people feel safer, heard, understood, appreciated, and included. The leader must employ respectful and clear language, even when facing discord. And this is called Empathy. The leader focuses on it, the more they build an impactful action agenda in an environment where trust and collaboration are fostered, creating meaningful results.
Challenge 5: Resistance to Change
No leadership agenda is resistance-proof. When aiming to change an existing environment, leaders first start the process of shaking the foundations and slowly destroying the comfort zone. And through this process, people begin to feel uncomfortable. As humans tend to feel comfortable, they often resist what is new and may find it disturbing to their peace. Whether it is to make a personal change, complete a school task, undertake a university project, or change the workplace environment, it may cause disturbance and stress. And to that, people react differently, led by their emotional intelligence level. However, for the leader to support the change and find the best way to balance, the best weapon is…
To Lead with Vision and Positivism
A positive mindset doesn’t eliminate challenges, but instead makes them more rational and emphasizes the outcome, rather than focusing on what can’t be done. Illustrating what is achievable and highlighting how the change, in general, aids personal growth, also helps the process. People need to understand the rationale behind what is happening, and the leader should work on delivering that rationale to them, aligned with a clear vision and connected to the organization’s mission and values. Additionally, maintaining a positive outlook is also beneficial. People in the environment can sense and perceive when something is wrong or negatively charged. The more the leader focuses on bringing a positive outcome to the forefront of everyone’s attention, the less the people around them act defensively and attach themselves to what appears to be a change.
And now we have come to our…
Final Thoughts:
There is a generic phrase that people often use to motivate themselves to adapt to a changing environment. And this phrase is “Leadership Starts with You.” Does this phrase sound familiar? The generic term ‘it’ looks at, the phrase covers most of the action agenda. An individual must first make the change happen within themselves and then extend it to the outside environment.
Activating inner strengths involves trusting yourself and evolving through challenges and discomfort while following a clear agenda that aligns with personal and organizational values. Transformation begins within the person, and having the clearest possible agenda helps a great deal. Making it the right way ensures significant transformation.
Leadership, as a whole, is more like a journey than a final destination a person may want to reach. The more an individual practices it, the more they learn and evolve. And the more the leader develops, the better the environment around them becomes. It is why, as a leader, you need to understand the meaning of the phrase> “Leadership starts from within”, and try your best to transform it into a working action agenda.
The Human place - a path from you to yourself 