Being in a leadership position can be quite difficult if you are too stiff. I have personally seen people in leadership positions that seem to be stuck in a fight or flight state continually. What I mean by this is that I have seen people in leadership positions that seem to be in an incredibly nervous and apprehensive state all the time. If you look at these people, they tend to shiver like a nervous poodle and they take any small thing as an affront to them personally.

A person in this kind of tense nervous state, creates bad feeling in any area that they find themselves in. If a person like this is put in a leadership position, they tend to overreact and take their job far too seriously. While it is true that a leadership position requires a serious attitude, an overtly serious attitude can cause many difficulties which will not allow for good group functioning. I leader needs to be far more flexible and must have the ability to not take him or herself so seriously.

A good leader must always be able to laugh at himself. If a leader is not able to laugh at himself, then he will come off as being overtly serious to those that must follow him. Self-importance is an incredibly debilitating mannerism, and this is especially the case if you are a leader of a group of people. If you cannot take your ‘SELF’ lightly, you are essentially creating a type of heaviness in your self which just like a gravitational pull, tends to suck any kind of good energy away from those people that rely on you to provide positive and enthusiastic energy to get them going. Essentially a leader that is too stiff and to self important, will not be able to provide the kind of positive energy that is required to get others to follow his orders.

Many would-be leaders, tend to think that their position means that they must walk around like a monarch or a head of state. This is completely incorrect since this is the worst thing that you can do when you are trying to create a following of motivated and trustworthy individuals. Next time that you blunder, make sure that you let go of that self-important stiffness and laugh at yourself. Leaders that are able to laugh at themselves are able to create a positive and light mood in their followers and this is critical when you are trying to create a good band of individuals. The only thing that should be important to a good leader, is great performance from his team and the ability to accomplish whatever tasks are brought before him. Self-importance should always come in dead last in a leaders importance scale. This means that a leader must be willing to laugh at himself and must be willing to see things outside of his own selfish mentality.

If someone in your team screws up or make some kind of mistake, make sure that you are also able to take it lightly and laugh with them in a goodhearted way. If you are able to step outside of your self-importance, you will know if the person who has made a mistake did it by accident or through no fault of his or her own. Using good judgment, laugh at the mistakes that others make when you know that they were not being lazy or inept. By being able to take yourself and others lightly, without so much seriousness and draconian angst, you will be seen as a fair leader who is positive and energetic. Your followers will rally around you and your team will develop into a good band of workers that will be able to handle just about anything that you can throw at them.

You maintain your leadership status and position by always making sure that you are the person who has the last word on everything. Laugh at yourself and laugh at the mistakes of others when you deem it is correct, but with a smile, make sure that your team knows that there is a line where they must get serious and focus on the job that they need to do at the moment. You do this by allowing others to work using their own strengths and feeling like they are not being oppressed, but at the same time developing a strong character yourself so that others feel that they can rely on you to make the hard decisions and to get things moving along.

In order to be a good leader you must let go of your self-importance. The more human that you are perceived to be by others, the more that they will respect you and your decisions. By taking yourself lightly and being able to joke, you are seen as a decent and humane leader who is trusted to be empathic enough to make decisions that will not hurt any individual or the team in general. A leader that is able to laugh at himself, will have the ability to develop a strong team of individuals that will follow his decisions without negativity.