The Best Leaders Are The Ones Who Make Us Feel Safe
Safety is something we feel in our bodies
Have you seen the Twitter post that asks us to “imagine if we measured success by the amount of safety that people felt in our presence?”
I doubt the author, an Astrologer, was thinking about the workplace when he penned this tweet but isn’t this the crux of what great leadership is all about?
Looking back at my career, it’s clear that the best leaders I ever worked for were the ones who made me feel safe. Safe to share my perspective. Safe to disagree. Safe to experiment and make a mistake or two.
They made it feel safe to show up and just be me, even on the days when I wasn’t at my best.
If you had asked me two years ago to define “safety,” I probably would have stared blankly back at you as if you were asking me a trick question.
Unless there was a gun being held to my head, surely I was “safe.”
Right?
That assumption changed when I embarked on a journey to unpack some childhood trauma in therapy about nine months ago. Suddenly I was spending…
