How Successful People Lead Part 2

Most of the time when people enter a leadership position, they do so because it was granted or appointed by some other person in authority. That probably seems obvious. But think about the implication: It usually means that the person in authority believes the new leader has some degree of potential for leading. That's good news. So if you're new to leadership and you have been invited to lead something, then celebrate the fact that someone in authority believes in you.

The best leaders promote people into leadership based on leadership potential, not on politics, seniority, credentials, or convenience. If you have a new leadership position, then let me say welcome to the first step in your leadership journey. You have a seat at the table and have been invited to be part of the "leadership game." You will have opportunities to express your opinion and make decisions. Your initial goal should be to show your leader and your team that you deserve the position you have received.

Whether you were invited to lead a week or a decade ago, it's never too late to express grat.i.tude to the person who invited you to the leadership table. Take the time to write a note or an e-mail to thank that person and express the positive impact that leading has had on your life.

2. A Leadership Position Means Authority

Is Recognized

When an individual receives a position and t.i.tle, some level of authority or power usually comes with them. Often in the beginning that power is very limited, but that's okay because most leaders need to prove themselves with little before being given much.

As a new leader, you must use the authority you are given wisely, to advance the team and help the people you lead. Do that, and your people will begin to give you even greater authority. When that happens, you gain leadership, not just a position.

3. A Leadership Position Is an Invitation

to Grow as a Leader

The journey through the 5 Levels of Leadership will only be successful if you dedicate yourself to continual development. If you believe that the position makes the leader, you will have a hard time becoming a good leader. You will be tempted to stop and "graze," meaning you'll stay where you are and enjoy the position's benefits instead of striving to grow and become the best leader you can. If you want to make an impact, start with yourself.

The leaders who do the greatest harm to an organization are the ones who think they have arrived. Once they receive the t.i.tle or position they desire, they stop growing. They stop innovating. They stop improving. They rest on their ent.i.tlements and clog up everything. Make the most of this opportunity in leadership by making growth your goal. And strive to keep growing. Good leaders are always good learners. To be an effective leader, you must believe that the leadership position you receive is merely an invitation to grow. If you do that and become a lifetime learner, you will continually increase your influence over time. And you will make the most of your leadership potential, no matter how great or small it might be.

4. A Leadership Position Allows Potential

Leaders to Shape and Define Their Leadership

The greatest upside potential for people invited to take a leadership position is that it affords them the opportunity to decide what kind of leader they want to be. The position they receive may be defined, but they, as people, are not. When you first become a leader, your leadership page is blank and you get to fill it in any way you want! What kind of leader do you want to be? Don't just become reactive and develop a style by default. Really think about it. Do you want to be a tyrant or a team builder? Do you want to come down on people or lift them up? Do you want to give orders or ask questions? You can develop whatever style you want as long as it is consistent with who you are.

If you are new to leadership-or new to a particular leadership position-it is the perfect time to think about the leadership style you desire to develop. If you are an experienced leader, you can of course reevaluate the way you lead and make changes. However, you will be working against your people's past experiences and have to overcome their expectations.

As you move forward, consider the following three things: Who Am I?

Good leadership begins with leaders knowing who they are. Successful leaders work hard to know themselves. They know their own strengths and weaknesses. They understand their own temperament. They know what personal experiences serve them well. They know their work habits as well as their daily, monthly, and seasonal rhythms. They know which kinds of people they work well with and which kinds they have to try harder with to appreciate. They have a sense of where they are going and how they want to get there. As a result, they know what they're capable of doing, and their leadership is steady. Knowing yourself on a pretty deep level isn't quick or easy. It is a long and involved process. Some of it isn't particularly fun. But it is necessary if you want to become a better leader. Self-knowledge is foundational to effective leading.

What Are My Values?

Your values are the soul of your leadership, and they drive your behavior. Before you can grow and mature as a leader, you must have a clear understanding of your values and commit to living consistently with them-since they will shape your behavior and influence the way you lead. As you reflect on your values, I believe you should settle what you believe in three key areas: Ethical Values-What does it mean to do the right thing for the right reason?

Relational Values-How do you build an environment of trust and respect with others?

Success Values-What goals are worth spending your life on?

If you answer these questions and commit yourself to living your values in these three areas, you'll be well on your way to developing the integrity that makes you attractive to team members and makes them want to follow your leadership.

Immature leaders try to use their position to drive high performance. Mature leaders with self-knowledge realize that consistently high performance from their people isn't prompted by position, power, or rules. It is encouraged by values that are real and genuine.

What Leadership Practices Do I Want to Put into Place?

If you want to become a successful leader, you must not only know yourself and define your values, you must also live them out. You will not grow as a leader unless you commit to getting out of your comfort zone and trying to be a better leader than you are today. Write a declaration of commitment to growth that describes what you will do to grow and how you will approach it. Then sign and date it. Put it someplace where you can reference it in the future. This marks the day you committed to becoming the leader you have the potential to be.

As you think about the way you will define your leadership, take into consideration what kinds of habits and systems you will consistently practice. What will you do to organize yourself? What will you do every day when you arrive at work? What spiritual practices will you maintain to keep yourself on track? How will you treat people? What will be your work ethic? What kind of example will you set? Everything is up for grabs. It's up to you to define it. And the earlier you are on the leadership journey, the greater the potential for gain if you start developing good habits now. (You may want to look at my book Make Today Count for the twelve areas I focus on and the habits I use daily to manage my life.) The bottom line is that an invitation to lead people is an invitation to make a difference. Good leadership changes individual lives. It forms teams. It builds organizations. It impacts communities. It has the potential to impact the world. But never forget that position is only the starting point.

The Downside of Position

True Leadership Isn't about Position

Like everything else in life, the Position level of leadership has negatives as well as positives. Each of the levels of leadership possesses downsides as well as upsides. You will find as you move up the levels that the upsides increase and the downsides decrease. Since Position is the lowest level of leadership, it has a great number of negatives. On Level 1, I see eight major downsides.

1. Having a Leadership Position Is

Often Misleading

The easiest way to define leadership is by position. Once you have a position or t.i.tle, people will identify you with it. However, positions and t.i.tles are very misleading. A position always promises more than it can deliver. Having a leadership position does not make you a leader; rather, it is an opportunity to become a leader.

When I received my first position as a pastor I didn't understand that leadership was given to me but not yet earned by me. I arrived at my first meeting to find that a long-standing member of the church had been earning his influence through many positive actions over many years. Even though he did not have the official leadership t.i.tle, people followed him-not me-as a result. Back then I defined leading as a noun (who I was) not a verb (what I was doing). Leadership is action, not position.

2. Leaders Who Rely on Position to Lead

Often Devalue People

People who rely on position for their leadership almost always place a very high value on holding on to their position-often above everything else they do. They often see subordinates as an annoyance, as interchangeable cogs in the organizational machine, or even as troublesome obstacles to their goal of getting a promotion to their next position. As a result, departments, teams, or organizations that have positional leaders suffer terrible morale.

Leaders who rely on their t.i.tle or position to influence others just do not seem to work well with people. Some don't even like people! They neglect many of the human aspects of leading others. They ignore the fact that all people have hopes, dreams, desires, and goals of their own. They don't recognize that as leaders they must bring together their vision and the aspirations of their people in a way that benefits everyone. In short, they do not lead well because they fail to acknowledge and take into account that leadership-of any kind, in any location, for any purpose-is about working with people.

3. Positional Leaders Feed on Politics When leaders value position over the ability to influence others, the environment of the organization usually becomes very political. There is a lot of maneuvering. Positional leaders focus on control instead of contribution. They work to gain t.i.tles. They do what they can to get the largest staff and the biggest budget they can-not for the sake of the organization's mission but for the sake of expanding and defending their turf. And when a positional leader is able to do this, it often incites others to do the same because they worry that others' gains will be their loss. Not only does this create a vicious cycle of gamesmanship, posturing, and maneuvering; it also creates departmental rivalries and silos.

I have yet to find a highly political organization that runs at top efficiency and possesses high morale. Just look at most of our government inst.i.tutions and think about the leaders and workers in them. Most people could certainly use improvement, and moving away from positional leadership would do a lot to help them.

4. Positional Leaders Place Rights over

Responsibilities

Inevitably, positional leaders who rely on their rights develop a sense of ent.i.tlement. They expect their people to serve them; they don't look for ways to serve their people. Their job description is more important to them than job development. They value territory over teamwork. As a result, they usually emphasize rules and regulations that are to their advantage, and they ignore relationships. This does nothing to promote teamwork or create a positive working environment.

Just because you have the right to do something as a leader doesn't mean that it is the right thing to do. Changing your focus from rights to responsibilities is often a sign of maturity in a leader. Many of us were excited in early leadership years by the authority we had and what we could do with it. That power can be exhilarating, if not downright intoxicating. Each of us as leaders must strive to grow up and grow into a leadership role without relying on our rights. If we can mature in that way, we will start to change our focus from enjoying authority for its own sake to using authority to serve others.

5. Positional Leadership Is Often Lonely Being a good leader doesn't mean trying to be king of the hill and standing above (and apart from) others. Good leadership is about walking beside people and helping them to climb up the hill with you. King-of-the-hill leaders create a negative work environment because they are insecure and easily threatened. Whenever they see people with potential starting to climb, it worries them. They fear that their place on top is being threatened. As a result, they undermine the people who show talent, trying to guard their position and keep themselves clearly above and ahead of anyone else. What is the usual result? The best people, feeling undermined and put down, leave the department or organization and look for another hill to climb. Only average or unmotivated people stay. And they know their place is at the bottom. That develops an us-versus-them culture, with the positional leader standing alone on top. Leadership doesn't have to be lonely. People who feel lonely have created a situation that makes them feel that way. If you're atop the hill alone, you may get lonely. If you have others alongside you, it's hard to be that way.

6. Leaders Who Remain Positional Get

Branded and Stranded

Whenever people use their position to lead others for a long time and fail to develop genuine influence, they become branded as positional leaders, and they rarely get further opportunities for advancement in that organization. They may move laterally, but they rarely move up.

If you have been a positional leader, you can change, and this book will help you. However, you need to recognize that the longer you have relied on your position, the more difficult it will be for you to change others' perceptions about your leadership style. You may even need to change positions in order to restart the process of developing influence with others.

7. Turnover Is High for Positional Leaders When people rely on their positions for leadership, the result is almost always high turnover. Good leaders leave an organization when they have to follow bad leaders. Good workers leave an organization when the work environment is poor. Interview people who have left and the odds are high that they did not leave a job. They left the people they had to work with.

Every company has turnover. It is inevitable. The question every leader must ask is, "Who is leaving?" Organizations with Level 1 leadership tend to lose their best people and attract average or below-average people. The more Level 1 leaders an organization has, the more the door swings out with high-level people and in with low-level people.

An organization will not function on a level higher than its leader. It just doesn't happen. If a Level 1 leader is in charge, the organization will eventually be a Level 1 organization. If the leader is on Level 4, then the organization will never get to Level 5-unless the leader grows to that level.

8. Positional Leaders Receive People's Least,

Not Their Best

People who rely on their positions and t.i.tles are the weakest of all leaders. They give their least. They expect their position to do the hard work for them in leadership. As a result, their people also give their least. Some people who work for a positional leader may start out strong, ambitious, innovative, and motivated, but they rarely stay that way. Typically, they become one of the following three types of people.

Clock Watchers Followers who thrive in Level 1 leadership environments love clocks, and they want them visible at all times throughout the building. They evaluate every moment at work according to the clock: how long they've been there, how much time they have left, how long until break time, and how long until lunchtime. Clock watchers always know how much time is left before they get to go home, and they never want to work a moment beyond quitting time. But think about it: when the people who work with you can hardly wait to quit working with you, something is not working!

"Just-Enough" Employees When leaders use their leadership position as leverage, the people who work for them often begin to rely on their rights as employees and the limits of their job descriptions to protect them from having to work any more than is absolutely necessary. They do only what's required of them. They do just enough-to get by, to get paid, and to keep their job. When people follow a leader because they have to, they will do only what they have to. People don't give their best to leaders they like least. They give reluctant compliance, not commitment. They may give their hands but certainly not their heads or hearts. "Just-enough" people have a hard time showing up. The only commitment they show is to taking off the maximum days allowed for any reason. Some spend a lot of mental energy finding creative ways of eliminating work. If only they used that commitment in positive ways!

The Mentally Absent In a Level 1 environment, there are always individuals who may be physically present but mentally absent. They do not engage mentally, and they show up merely to collect a paycheck. This att.i.tude is highly damaging to an organization because it seems to spread. When one person checks out mentally and doesn't suffer any consequences for it, others often follow. Mental turnover and sloppiness are contagious. When the people who work for a team, a department, or an organization give little of themselves, the results are mediocre at best. And morale is abysmal. Success demands more than most people are willing to offer, but not more than they are capable of giving. The thing that often makes the difference is good leadership. That is not found on Level 1.

The greatest downside about Level 1 leadership is that it is neither creative nor innovative. It's leadership that just gets by. And if a leader stays on the downside of Level 1 long enough, he may find himself on the outside. If a leader fails on Level 1, there's nowhere to go but U-Haul territory. He'll be moving out and looking for another job.

Best Behaviors on Level 1