Quiz - Are You a Passionate Leader

Here’s a quick and easy quiz, based on my own experiences of leading – myself, my family, team members and others, as well as working with hundreds of other business leaders and managers over recent years. Leadership is particularly appropriate in the current climate, when so many people are actually abdicating responsibility for themselves and many political and business leaders are not trusted!

Don’t think too much about the statements – just go with your first thought or gut instinct about whether at the moment they are true for you or not. And if you currently don’t have team members - substitute family, friends, or other people in your life.

• You are energetic and enthusiastic – this describes you most of the time, rather than on occasions!

• You have a positive, ‘can do’ attitude – again you regularly display this as opposed to occasionally displaying this behaviour

• You attract people to you - you seem to be able to naturally relate to people rather than have to think about this or try very hard

• People believe what you say – they feel compelled to listen because you are able to enthusiastically describe what ‘could’ be; you paint pictures with words, you use stories, and metaphors.

• People believe in you – they believe in what you stand for and in what you do, because you have proven to them that you are trustworthy

• You're fun to be around – your passion and energy is infectious

• Your people seem to willingly do what's expected, or even go the extra mile – they do more than the minimum required because they’re inspired by you

• Your team are happy and settled – disagreements might occur but they are brought into the open, discussed, and dealt with constructively

• Your team feel valued because you talk to them regularly and offer continuous feedback – they know exactly where they stand on a day to day basis

So how did you do?

0-3 true statements = you have some work to do on yourself first, in terms of discovering and sustaining your own passion and energy, before you can be a more passionate leader of others

4-7 true statements = you're doing reasonably well in terms of consistently feeling and ‘being’ passionate. What can you do to improve your score? Where are you currently falling down?

8-9 true statements = congratulations, you’re able to work miracles! You might just want to check out whether your perceptions are the same as others, before I offer you a guest author slot in my next newsletter!

Now I know this was a fun quiz, and few of us would score top marks all of the time, but there were a couple of serious points here:

1.It might be appropriate to check out your perceptions of what others think or how others feel about you. This can be done informally by asking verbally, or more formally by asking people to complete a questionnaire or survey.

2.Passion is extremely important as a leader. Why? Because leadership is about inspiring people to make things happen. Have you ever been inspired by someone who wasn’t energetic and passionate? I thought not!

Passion conveys confidence - in the product or service, or future of your business.

Passion shows you care.

Passion draws people to you, and makes them want to deal with you – so it’s attractive and contagious - in a good way! It can also help others tap into their own motivations to get things done.

Because passion is not a word often associated with business leadership and management – it can mark you out as unique.

In addition, it’s passion that produces the high energy levels required both to sustain you when the going gets tough and to sustain others through the inevitable work challenges they’ll face.