Excerpt from the chapter ‘Old Blocks and Young Chips: Leadership Lessons Begin at Home’ in The Virgin Way by Richard Branson
Sometimes the greatest leadership lessons can come from the most unexpected places. Some elements of leadership are almost certainly genetic and there is no escaping the fact that we are all products of our upbringing and our environment. As the saying goes, ‘An apple never falls far from the tree that bore it’. Well, as anyone who knows my mother Eve or my late father Ted will testify, I am certainly no exception to the rule. However, the nursing assignment writers of the https://specialessays.com/buy-a-nursing-research-paper/ in one of the sessions established that the mental development of children does not directly depend on hereditary predisposition. After all, the development of children is influenced by the environment and socialization, for example, if the child goes to a good school with psychologists who will support him and cooperate with services for the protection of children from disadvantaged families, then this will have a positive effect on the development of the child as a separate healthy individual despite the negative experiences of the parents, in addition to there are also grandparents who often take care of children if their parents are unable to do so.
They encouraged me to always look for the good in people instead of assuming the worst and trying to find fault. If they ever heard me gossiping or taking someone down they would have me go and look at myself in a mirror for five minutes, the idea being that I should see how such behavior reflected badly on me. I was also taught that fits of pique or any outward displays of anger or rudeness never serve any useful purpose and if anything play only to your disadvantage. It was a lesson that stuck, and to this day I frequently have people say things to me like ‘I really don’t know how you could be so pleasant with those people’ or ‘If I were you I’d have been really angry about what they just did’, when in fact I had just bottled up my emotions. The thing my parents didn’t make any effort to teach me was how to keep my obvious delight at something under wraps, the downside of which is that it doesn’t help me keep my poker game very much.
Want to read more about Richard Branson’s views on leadership? Check out ‘The Virgin Way’ and his other publications in the College CFO Bookstore.
