Patience Before Judgment

If you lead long enough (ten minutes will probably do) you will discover a difficult person. Some days it will seem like teams filled with difficult people who are impossible to manage.

You can't change all those people. What you can change is how you interact with them. Maybe there's a way to reach them. Maybe they aren't difficult at all but in a difficult place. Maybe all they need at this moment is a compassionate AND courageous leader who can patiently coach them to better choices. Maybe. What won't help is rapid judgment and condemnation.

Some people really are too difficult to manage, but we should be patient and careful before reaching that conclusion.

Given patience, all that difficulty turns into a problem that can be solved. And that - solving problems - is what high performance leaders do.

-- doug smith

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