Courage

Leadership requires courage.  It's not important, it is completely required.  Sometimes being a leader is hard.  Sometimes you have to make hard decisions.  Sometimes (actually most times) doing the right thing is not going to set well with someone.

I had a meeting the other day.  I set it up, I ran it, it was my meeting.  That sounds kind of bad but I like to set ground rules in order to keep everyone from feeling that the meeting is a waste of time.  The ground rules include not talking over other people, don't make arguments personal, and don't bring your laptop and look at email the whole time.  The three people who did bring their laptops were kindly asked to put them away.  And they all closed them.

And then there was this one guy....

During the meeting his laptop was slowly re-opened.  He was hoping no one would notice but....duh.  There were only six of us at the meeting.  He wasn't paying any attention to anyone.  At one point he was showing something on his laptop to someone else. 

At the end of the meeting I asked him "next time you are in one of my meetings do not bring your laptop."  This really set him off with a big and meaningless "sorry".  He was really embarrassed because it was in front of everyone but mainly because it was in front of the boss.

Personally, I don't like confrontation.  But I felt like he was being disrespectful to me and everyone in that meeting.  Don't get me wrong, he deserved it.  But it took courage to call him out like that.  But if I didn't I felt like I would lose credibility.  So I did what needed to be done.

But for me, it wasn't easy.