How to Remain a Gracious Leader

When you work hard to accomplish your goals, do everything in your power to achieve a milestone and earn a leadership position, you have every right to be proud of your successes. However, it’s also just as important to remain gracious and treat your team with the same respect once you have made it to the top. While you’re enjoying the view you so rightly earned, it’s very easy to lose sight of what is right and what is wrong. Here are some ways to stay grounded, no matter how prosperous you are in life.

Show Humility

Taking pride in your accomplishments and pushing for constant achievements are great characteristics to possess. But people admire the leaders whose accomplishments speak for themselves and whose greatest achievements are noted as a result of the success of their team or followers as a whole.

Remember Your Hardworking Team

Being in a leadership position, you have a team you are working with. Sure, in the system of hierarchy, you are on the top tier of the triangle. But if you flip the triangle to be pointed down, and work in the mindset that your team who works with you is just as important to the results of success in your business, you will have a much healthier team. Building your business, no matter what field you’re in, is a team effort; it is not a venture you accomplished on your own. Be thankful for your company’s crew and treat them with the same respect. Take the job seriously but not yourself.

Apply the Same Standards Before Your Big Win

No doubt that serious, focused discipline is what gets the job done effectively and productively. That’s why your business has thrived. But not everyone can go nonstop as a robot all of the time. It’s okay to allow your team members to be humans. They need time to relax, recharge and take breaks. Show your team that they can have fun while they work as well. A little humor and light-hearted celebrations are much needed with your team to make working enjoyable and more successful.

Stay in Contact

It is very important, as you climb the stairs to success, that you do not disconnect yourself from everyone else. Do not lock yourself up in your big, private corner office away from the heart and soul of your hardworking team. Stay involved just as you did in the beginning of your venture and continue that same workmanship. Remember the people you meet on your way up will be the same people you may meet on your way down. Always be kind to those you work with.

After we reach a certain point in our successes, some of us subconsciously subscribe to the belief that we no longer need to work as hard to get what we want, or that we are now better than those around us. By adjusting our expectations, we will stay involved, humble and above all, gracious.

Image via Darling Issue 21 by Kayt Jones.