Repeating Our Mistakes?

A friend of mine shared this link with me yesterday.

If you don’t feel like clicking through the link is a brief explainer on what “showing initiative” looks like without putting in overtime or working off the clock. I think we’ve all fallen into the trap at one point or another of trying to offload a task to one of our team, finding they failed to follow through, and just picking up and doing it ourselves. Even worse, we never got back with that team member and performed the postmortem on how we could have achieved a different result.

I think a lot about the ongoing refrain of “nobody wants to work” I hear from business owners every day and the fact that some version of this has been repeated by every leader who ever came before. Seriously, Google it if you don’t believe me. Then, when I was having one of my “mental massage” Reddit breaks yesterday, I came across this little essay by Stan Lee. “Human nature doesn’t change. It’s the human condition that changes.”

What if we took that to heart? What if we became the leaders who teach initiative rather than the ones who fire everyone that doesn’t show it and keep trying to hire it?