17 Aug Leadership is About Your Journey, Not Your Destination

By Audra Cona, PHR, SHRM-CP

Exceptional leaders seem to have an innate knack for being a magnetic force and inspiring the people around them, don’t you think?

It might be simple to assume leaders become this way by having all the answers. Actually, some of the greatest leaders of our time are humble enough to admit that their inspiration is channeled from the ideas of the people they surround themselves with.

Learning to leverage and then elevate the strengths of a group is what truly sets an exceptional leader apart.

I’m grateful that early in my career I had the opportunity to be humbled by some sage advice from my then HR Director: After an important business meeting, where I likely did a lot of the talking and not enough of the listening, my director came to me and told me, “If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.”

The advice hit home.

I recognized I was busy attempting to prove what I knew and in doing so, I stopped learning from the people around me. In that moment I recognized success is not all about having it all figured out ahead of time. In fact, the minute we assume we are the only one with all the right answers is the minute we stop learning—and inevitably apathy occurs.

Since then, I have spent much of my career learning to observe and absorb from the exceptional talent that surrounds me daily.

If my goal is to grow into an exceptional leader, it’s important that I have bodacious goals and stay in a constant cycle of self-reflection–learning to be one percent better than who I was yesterday.

Continuous learning is not an endgame; it’s a journey.

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Audra Cona has been in the Human Resources industry for longer than she can count, so long in fact, she had the opportunity to watch HR shift from compliance-driven HR to human centric-People Operations model. She is the President/Founder of KSG Solutions where she is a is a “fractional” Chief People Officer for a few clients handling all aspects of People Operations for those clients. She dually certified in HR and her alma matter is Florida International University. Audra loves a challenge and gets excited about the opportunity to watch clients and employees grow in their roles.