Lent Leadership; Learning Leadership

With the curtain drawn on Trinbago Carnival 2020, the Season of Lent brings with it the age-old tropes and practices of fasting and self-restraint. Naturally, many of us welcome this period following what has quickly become a season of excess – revelling, eating and drinking, and just general merriment. Not surprisingly, people often use the time to refrain from indulging in customary practices, especially those that they would have partaken of during the Carnival season.

But is there a connection between the practice of fasting and strengthening one’s leadership style and approach? What leadership lessons can we possibly expect to learn from this period of abstinence?

There are in fact many overlaps between Lent and Leadership. The most salient, and the one I’d like to discuss here is introspection, since Lent is conceived of as a time of year when we relook at the traits and habits that make us who we are. More specifically, introspection in both Lent and Leadership as a way of revisiting and renewing our individual and collective pursuits of excellence in leadership.

To put this in the proper backdrop, we need to be mindful of the importance of leadership excellence as the truest, most important competitive advantage that a company or business can have.

In earlier discussions, we explored how powerful leadership is in inspiring and motivating, achieving goals, and ultimately in keeping businesses in the black. However, as much as strong leadership must be preached and practiced, it must also be renewed.

The sad reality is that many 21st Century leaders spend so much time championing their business goals that they either don’t have the time or the energy to restore the very traits that made them leaders in the first place.

On the one hand, you could posit that leaders should have an inexhaustible supply of gumption and vision. But we know this not to be so, if only primarily because leaders are human and everyone has their limit.

The irony that the hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself should never be discounted. Many successful businesses and leaders that generated high returns and showed tremendous promise have failed because of their inability to stop, look around, and most of all, look inside candidly.

While this introspective journey is one, that by its very definition, we each have to make for ourselves, it doesn’t mean that we can’t share and discuss those signposts along our respective paths that we frequently must check and stop by.

Here are three that mean a great deal to me.

The Power of Imagination can never be overstated. As children, we indulged our imaginations. In fact, doing so was highly encouraged. Then, along the path to adulthood, imagination became regarded as something childlike and fanciful. While many of us temper our imaginations, grounding them in the realms of what is possible and what is not, we have to be careful never to let them die.

Imagination is the power to create. It is the power to look at the way things are now and go far ahead in space and time to see how they could be in the future.

As leaders, we have to take the time to feed our imaginations a healthy diet of expertise, experience, and examples; always mindful that as we achieve the very possible, we have a responsibility to push the envelope and provide the things that many thought were impossible.

Desire is one of those words that have, over time, been reduced to or connected with something unsavoury. People often refer to it in a negative context, all but equating it to lust or base craving.

But desire is passion. Show me a leader who isn’t passionate about what they do, why they do it, and for whom they do it, and I’ll show you a leader not living up to his or her fullest potential. Show me a leader who doesn’t nurture his or her desire to serve and lead better and I will show you a leader only half-invested in their company’s future.

It may seem out of place to mention desire in a talk about Lent and Leadership, but passion, once directed and maintained for the greater good is always a positive and necessary thing.

Faith is the cornerstone of excellence in leadership. Without it, how can we expect to put in the necessary effort to achieve our goals? Whether your faith lies in external powers or, even on a more secular level, in the abilities of our teams and ourselves, it is the one determining factor that keeps us moving forward.

Faith is a strange trait, however; simultaneously unbreakable and fragile. Having a strong faith is essential and having your faith challenged or broken can be devastating. Paradox aside, faith, like desire and imagination, must also be frequently examined and renewed for it to be serve its greater purpose – leading the way to success and successful leaders.

“Forty days and forty nights”, as the old standard goes, is the order for the foreseeable future. Of course, leadership extends far beyond this period, but the major takeaway is that it is a time of introspection.

We have touched upon how becoming a more introspective leader can make us more purposeful and effective, more creative, more passionate and more faithful.

The successes of the past must continue to pave the way for us as leaders to take those necessary quiet moments to shore up our inner emotional assets. This is one of the best ways that we can surmount challenge, seize opportunities, and most of all, bring out the best in our teams and in ourselves.

The gaps that exist between who we are as leaders and who we are as human beings are not as vast as they may seem. The bridge that links the two must be built out of that basic honesty and self-awareness that only comes about from introspection.

So, even as we give up certain practices for the Lenten period, we should be equally as eager to adopt wholesome leadership ones that will serve us well in the long term. Self-awareness, honesty, respect, trust and candour come quickest to mind.

If we want to be successful at this, then we have to take a moment and reflect upon ourselves.