Leadership’s primary goal is to navigate and support a group of people in various endeavors. While performing this task, a leader will run into so-called “problem situations”, which include both personal and professional setbacks. One of the negative personal difficulties I consider the most difficult is the imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome refers to the feeling of doubt created by one’s belief that they are unworthy of a leadership position. The professional hindrance that I find the most intimidating is handling different perspectives. Through personal experience, I understand that striking a balance between differing goals, ambitions, and solutions is stressful and taxing.
In order to handle the imposter syndrome, one can apply some psychological techniques. For example, one should focus on facts validating their achievements rather than emotions that tell them they do not deserve the leader’s position. It is also important to share these doubts and feelings. This can be accomplished through devising one’s own “battle journal”. On one page of this journal, a person writes their imposter beliefs (opposing army) and, on the other, their achievements and kind words their close-ones use to support them (their army). The visual comparison will allow fears of imposture to disappear.
Handing different perspectives is another difficulty of leadership that can be solved creatively. A technique to handle such a problem could be the shared leadership technique, which is suggested to be highly beneficial for teamwork (Sinha, Chiu, & Srinivas, 2021). A lottery can be introduced in order to bring an element of entertainment into sharing leader responsibilities. A random couple of people would be chosen each month to share the leader’s position. This will allow the people to gauge challenging aspects of leadership and become more closely accustomed to the organization’s infrastructure.
Reference
Sinha, R., Chiu, C. Y., & Srinivas, S. B. (2021). Shared leadership and relationship conflict in teams: The moderating role of team power base diversity. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 42(5), 649–667.