With this leadership skill, your career will make a vertical ascent. No matter how lowly you begin, you will quickly rise to a position of power and influence. Still, it takes effort. It requires will-power. It works like a blade of grass pushing up through concrete. Do you know what it is? Adaptability. Modesty and adaptability. If you do a good job and you are modest, you will be noticed. If you can adapt yourself to obstacles and bend around them, you’ll be able to start at the bottom and quickly achieve something high and great.
Are you interested in nonprofit leadership?
According to the Harvard Business Review, executives with knowledge and leadership skills are desperately needed. The nonprofit sector in the United States must find at least 330,000 senior executives by 2016 to fill the gap created by managers’ retirement. – Shar McBee
Shar: Your advice is right on the money this morning. While I have been forced to learn to be adaptable at work, the modesty part of it has been more difficult to pull off. As the motto of many companies these days is “do more with less,” the adapting was a survival skill. After doing more with less for four years, it’s difficult to be humble about having survived the bad economic times as well as the climate of fear at work and the accompanying sensitive egos that go along with major cutbacks. Thanks for giving me something to think about.
Veronica: Thank you for this thoughtful response. It is hard to do a good job and then be humble about it. Trusting that we are being helped is part of it, I think. You can see the opposite easily…people who do a good job and then boast proudly — they take away from their good work. Shar