Leaders are labeled, criticized, envied, hated, and admired.
Ultimately, he or she will be blamed for failure or congratulated
for success.

     At the end of the day, regardless of the outcomes, a true
leader must earn the respect of those they lead. And the leader,
alone with their thoughts, must deal with their own inner
struggles privately and not allow the victories or defeats to affect
their rhythms of leadership.

     Save for passion and commitment, a leader can not afford the
luxury of showing their true feelings regardless of how justified
or warranted they are. A leader must walk down a crowded
hallway unaffected by any current personal or professional
situations, showing no weakness regardless of how weak they
may feel on any given day. Why? Because a leader at every level
must inspire confidence, strength, and conviction regardless.

A Double-Edged Sword

     Certainly compassion, a derivative of passion, impacts every
decision we make. But regretfully it tends to be a double-edged
sword. To show too much for too long weakens performance
and in actuality breeds stagnation and inevitably failure. To
not show enough creates an environment of insecurity and
disrespect that leads to fragmented groups, turnover, and
ultimately failure.

     So, the objective for leaders is to find the balance. How much
compassion is a leader truly allowed to feel and exercise without
sacrificing the performance and goals of an individual, group, or
organization? It becomes a daily struggle for the leader to try to
balance their personal and professional issues along with trying
to determine exactly what each individual and group needs
personally and professionally to be successful with whatever task
or process they’re involved with.

     Ultimately, it is the ability of the leader to use their position,
their job, and their work environment as a place to escape from
their own realities, to lose themselves in their role so that they
can focus on others and attempt to intuitively find the balance of
leadership. They must make decisions founded in the brain, but
filtered by the heart.

Doing What’s Right

     All leaders must be grounded by doing what’s right, which
at times is the biggest struggle of them all. Doing what’s right
is driven by definition, because how one defines what’s right is
the issue. At times, doing what’s right for an organization may
be diametrically opposed to doing what’s right for an individual.
And therein lays the struggle of all leaders.

     Friendship, loyalty, and compassion must at times be
sacrificed for the good of the organization or for the good of a
community. Therefore finding the balance is imperative if success
is to be accomplished. Most often when things reach that point,
intuition is overshadowed by fact, or should I say weakness.
Finding the answer to a leadership issue merely becomes an
internal struggle of dealing with the cold cruel facts and ones
own heart. Or is it merely dealing with the realities and having
the strength to lead?

     Leadership in its generic form has rhythm that when found
offers an element of peace, separateness, aloneness, and at times
even insecurity. It separates you, isolates you, and makes you
vulnerable. But without it you can not lead.

The Desire to Lead

     At most everyone’s core is the desire to be a leader.
Therefore, one must be willing to pay the price to be a leader
and one must fulfill the obligation of leadership in order to
survive, regardless of how uncomfortable or difficult some of the
decisions may be.

     Over the last few years our industry has seen a number of
senior positions lost to non-loss prevention executives. It has
been the subject of many conversations throughout the entire
retail industry. In those discussions that I have been involved,
it ultimately ends by saying that we are not producing leaders
within our own ranks.

     So, I have to ask these questions of all of you—what are you
doing to develop your own leadership skills, and what are you
doing to develop tomorrow’s leaders?

     Certainly the current effort to establish a Loss Prevention
Certification program is needed and long overdue. But the solution
to this issue lies squarely on each individual in our industry. At the
heart of it each individual is responsible for themselves and for the
people they lead. And how serious you take your own career and
those that you lead will determine how successful we are as an
industry with producing tomorrow’s leaders.