A short spoken piece by Chad Silverstein about leadership during hard times. Silverstein advises leaders to transmit hope (not fear), be realistic yet positive, and to anchor themselves in guiding beliefs or past experiences so they — and their teams — can endure severe challenges.
Chapters
Forecast with faith. It's a hard thing to do, especially when things are hard. I'll never forget when Chet taught me about how leaders have to transmit hope. You have to be realistic, but you have to transmit hope to your team. I've had leaders in my company that would transmit fear and try to use the fear to try to get people to perform better. And it's just not healthy. Instilling fear in people around you because of your paranoia or because of your fear is just not what great leaders do. Great leaders will admit the truth and they see reality and they're going to transmit hope. This is how people get through really hard things when everything in them is screaming just to quit and give up and there's no hope. But they keep hope. And they have this guiding principle or light or vision. Call it what you want, but it's found in the build to lead work in the framework. Whether you're going to dig it out from your core or whether you're going to dig it out from your opus, you're going to have something that's guiding you so that when times get really tough and the storm that hits you is a hurricane, that you still are able to look out and have faith. Have faith that your hard work wasn't done for nothing. Have faith that there is something bigger than you that is going to carry you. And if you've already experienced something in your life, then you have proof of that, which you should learn from. And if you have people around you that have gone through something that to you was unbearable and they got through it, you should learn from that. So again, you know, embracing the pain and suffering. Pay to play. Gotta do it. Transmitting hope, hard to do. Gotta stay positive and yet be realistic. But hopefully you have something that can put some guardrails around that hope and that you're not just kind of just throwing something out for the sake of trying to be positive. You're actually doing it because you have a belief, you have experience, you have something that again, is guiding you. And. And sometimes it may be something that you can't explain, and it may be something that you can't prove. But sometimes as a leader, there are things that you're just going to have to do because you want to do it. And there are going to be things that you believe because you believe it, and sometimes you don't have to explain it. The answer is it's because it's what you want. And so sometimes there's this trap that people get into with build to lead because we like to be challenged. And we have to have a why for everything. And it's true. And sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's because it is what it is. And that's okay, too. So adopt that mindset. And don't feel like you always have to explain yourself, but have something that hopefully will carry you through the tough times. To transmit that hope to yourself, to people you're leading. Maybe it's your family, maybe it's the people at work. And figure out where in your core and your opus you're going to be able to lean on and grab onto when tough times come. Because they're coming.
