Recharge Your Leadership Mojo: 8 Ways to Reignite Your Passion

It's been a grueling five years. On the global stage, we've seen bailouts, rampant unemployment, sluggish consumer confidence, declining home values and rising prices. For those still lucky enough to be employed, all this doom and gloom has manifested as insecurity, fear, stress and overwork. We may be technically in recovery, but at this point, employees are over it. And let's be honest: As a leader, you're as burned out as they are. You know in your heart that the only way you'll ever make it in the global economy is to get people engaged, motivated and passionate about their work. But trying to do so with your worn-down spirit and kit of blunt leadership tools is a bit like fueling a rocket ship with tepid bath water, says Mohan Nair.

"The old ways of leadership, the old rules, might as well be hieroglyphics on a cave wall," says Mohan Nair, author of Strategic Business Transformation: The 7 Deadly Sins to Overcome. "Since our brave new world is dominated by 'unknown unknowns'—and powered by serving rather than winning—organizations have to change the way they lead their people.

"The future belongs to those companies that have the mojo not just to withstand change but to actually create change in their favor—and hopefully in a direction that's good for others," he adds. "That requires a business model in which there simply are no sharply defined leaders and followers."

But how do you break the self-destructive cycle and change the unhealthy employer/employee dynamic that is crippling everyone? Quite simply, you start by transforming yourself. Nair offers the following tips:

Admit you have a mojo dysfunction. Your company has been operating in survival mode for a while now, and that's not good for anyone. But before you can reignite others, you must reignite yourself.

"Sure, it can be hard and scary and exhausting to realize everything you've built your leadership legacy on is wrong," notes Nair. "It's a lot easier, in the short term anyway, to go on pretending nothing has changed. But once you find the courage to face the truth, you take the first step toward a new paradigm that's so much better for all concerned."