#6 Rap Lyric That Shaped My Leadership Style

For the background of this list – see my original post from 2-10-12.

The #6 Rap Lyric That Shaped My Leadership Style comes from Drake, making his first appearance on the countdown, straight out of Toronto.  The line actually comes from the Timbaland song that features Drake – Say Something. The line is:

“It’s funny how someone else’s success brings pain”

If you’re competitive, I mean really competitive, you might have felt this.  You’re working your tail off, only to see someone else have really good success, and it actually seems to hurt in your chest – like a burning feeling. It’s not that you wish ill towards the other person, or that you don’t even want them to have their own success – you probably do want them to be successful – but still there is that pain.

As a leader we have to be able to recognize this within our teams – that each and every one of our team wants success and they want each other to have success – but when some get it over others, many times those who don’t get it are going to have some frustration and pain.  It’s completely normal.  Many times we start believing these individuals aren’t “team players”, etc. because they don’t have a positive reaction to another teammates success.  So often I’ve seen this misdiagnosed!  It has nothing to do with how this one teammate feels about another teammates success – it has everything to do with how this individual is internalizing their own lack of success.

If we can understand this, help this person work through it to find their own success – many times you end up with an additional successful employee who is as engaged as ever.  I see organizations all the time ignore this, and the person takes off to another company and finds success there – when they could have stayed and found it where they were at.  Everyone in your organization is different – not everyone is going to see another person’s success as a huge positive.  It might be they feel, or have put, so much pressure on themselves to be successful – seeing someone else succeed just points our their own struggle.

Work with them – help them find their own success.  Don’t automatically take the easy approach of just believing everyone should be supportive and happy of everyone else – some of your best employees are your most competitive – and that competitive nature can do crazy stuff with your mind.  They’ll work through it – but they might just need a little help from you!

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