Here is the book review of Lead with Humility: 12 Leadership Lessons from Pope Francis from Jeffrey A. Krames.
Leadership is not something that can be learned in school. It is not something that you can tell “I am the leader.” It is more practical and how other people see you as an entrepreneur or manager in front of them.
A good business leader will need unique leadership skills that will make him different from other organizational members. Someone who will lead others, and someone who will be followed by others. A good business leader needs to be authentic, effective, and compassionate.
Jeffrey A. Krames is the bestselling author of many popular business books and his recently released book, “Lead With Humility: 12 Leadership Lessons From Pope Francis” is another one that I can put at the highest position of my best business books.
In this book, he outlines twelve lessons translated from the pope’s ideas and practices into easy for understanding tactics that anyone can use to become a better business leader. The book is full of practical examples for each of the lessons or tactics. Simply, these 12 lessons put me in the position to think about the changes in my own behavior, thinking and doing things.
Related: Real-life Organizational Decision-Making Examples
These are 12 lessons that Krames focus in the book:
- Lead with humility. As a manager or entrepreneur, you are not the most competent person for everything in the organization that you are leading. The biggest organizational competence comes from the possibilities to integrate specific individual’s competence in the function of organizational goals.
- Smell like your flock. You are part of your team members like everyone else. So, why not talk with them, help them, be one of them.
- Who am I to judge? Instead of judging your organizational members –help them, listen to them, teach them, and make them as better as possible. Your employees are all different, and you cannot judge them because of these differences. But, as a good business leader, you can build higher organizational strengths on these differences.
- Don’t change – Reinvent. All organizations are full of bureaucracy and dated ideology. Your responsibility is to keep your organization relevant for today’s way of doing things.
- Make inclusion a top priority. Good business leaders are more inclusive than other people. It’s not enough to communicate and give feedback to people once a year.
- Avoid insularity. As a leader, you need to avoid insularity by using the wider lens to find possible better ways of doing things. Organizational borders are limiting factors.
- Chose pragmatism over ideology. A business leader will need to be pragmatic as much as possible. Simply, prepare yourself to try, experiment, and implement new ideas and approaches.
- Employ the optics of decision-making. The Decision-making process will need to include priorities of other people’s decisions. It is not only your strategy important for other people’s decisions. They will have their own priorities.
- Run your organization like a field hospital. Even today we have many different tools to increase our productivity and work remotely from our offices, still, the best way to help people and encourage them is having face-to-face time with your customers, non-customers, team members, and other important stakeholders for your organization.
- Live on the frontier. It is important for you as a business leader to spend “time on the periphery” in order to understand other people’s lives.
- Confront adversity head-on. Simply, turn adversity in your biggest advantage. You cannot allow yourself to pretend that catastrophe is not here, you need to work clear through what happened and become stronger and clever from the experience you have.
- Pay attention to non-customers. Even your customers are the most important persons from your organization, probably there are many other people who can help you, give you feedback or become your future customers. Expand your network and communicate, learn, and do different things.
