Inspirational Leadership Requires Self-Esteem

A PERSON who wants to work on their leadership ability should work on their self-esteem.

The job of a leader is to persuade and inspire. A leader needs to develop and persuasively convey a clear vision of what their organisation plans to do, and to inspire and empower the people who work for that organisation to contribute towards making that vision become a reality.

A leader with high self-esteem will be able to do that job more effectively. There are at least three reasons for this:

1. A leader with a low self-esteem may feel the need to prove that they are right, or feel the need to take credit for any success achieved by the organisation. This kind of behaviour is unlikely to inspire and will not encourage people to give their best efforts;
2. A leader with low self-esteem is more likely to hire other people with low self-esteem because they are intimidated by people with more confidence than themselves; and
3. High self-esteem contributes to high performance. This view is supported by Nathaniel Branden, author of The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, who has identified six practices that result from (and contribute towards) high self-esteem:
   a.  living consciously;
   b.  self-acceptance;
   c.  self-responsibility;
   d.  self-assertiveness;
   e.  living purposefully; and
   f.  personal integrity.

A leader who operates at a high level of consciousness, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, purposefulness, and personal integrity, that would certainly be inspirational.

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