Leadership Articles

Doing everything yourself doesn’t make you powerful - it makes you unavailable. Let’s talk about what it really means to lead with intention instead of overwhelm.

What is this Upendo Ventures thing, anyway?  I mean, it sounds funny and it seems to have come out of nowhere.  Also, what in the world has Will Strohl (me) been up to the past few months?  These and many more questions have been coming our way, and this article hopes to answer many of them.  Needless to say, we’re very excited to introduce Upendo Ventures to you.

There are numerous ways as a leader to measure yourself, your progress, and your goals.  Not all of them are scientific, but they give you a way to move forward to improve yourself.  Sometimes you will have the benefit of measurable progress indicators, and luckily, your email inbox is one of them.  You can easily use your inbox to gauge several things, including when you need to delegate and focus on specific areas of the business.

This topic is as old as leadership is.  From the very beginnings of people being led, this art has been studied.  People have been training, writing, and blogging about how to best communicate to those you mean to lead.  The problem with saying anything to your staff is that they will always have three meanings, regardless to how much planning, thought, and good will you put into it.  There will be what your words mean, what you mean by your words, and what each member of your team thinks you mean by it.  It’s your responsibility to either strike certain phrases and statements from your vocabulary, or learn when the right time to use those words is.

No matter how short or long you’ve been “the boss,” communication will always be your most challenging aspect of the job.  You’ll go through recurring phases of focusing on direction, feedback, motivation, correspondence, and more.  (That is, if you’re worth your salt as a leader… You’ll be bettering your leadership skills daily.)  Communications are always tricky.  If I learned nothing else from Daniel Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence, it’s that we need to focus on communication and that communication will always be different for the situation, person, and medium.

There are tons of topics and ideas where people feel confused.  For some of us it’s financing.  For others, it’s stocks.  Some people get confused with sports.  Not everyone understands why or how football works the way it does.  In fact, nearly all of us use English words incorrectly every day.  Simply put, we often take knowledge for-granted.  In addition, if you hold a management or leadership title, it’s possible that you might not realize the difference.  Being a leader and being a manager is not the same thing.  Not by a longshot.