You may be a leader, but are you leading?
Many in leadership positions, even when they have been trained in leadership, continue to manage.
Why?
Because that is what their bosses are demanding of them. While leadership may be espoused from the top, in many organisations it is not valued. A little like all those company values hung on the wall, written but not behaved – do what I say not what I do.
In fact, a good friend of mine was explaining recently the one of the major problems with board is that they do not spend enough time “doing leadership” because they are too busy solving crises.
Unless you have a leader who is in the habit of leading, thereby valuing the activity, you’ll have little encouragement to be a leader.
Another challenge is that many leadership training sits in splendid isolation from the harsh reality of many deadline-driven organisations. I made this point in the opening chapter of Influential Leadership: A Leader’s Guide to Getting Things Done. Unless you can influence your work today to create the space for leadership activities, it’s never going to happen.
After all, what are you being paid to do? Even better, what will you get fired for not doing?
A third major reason is the mass of models out there all believing they have the answer – yes, I hold my hand up here, me too. What this demonstrates is that there is no simple answer to what is leadership? It is many things to many people, in many places at many times.
Despite the lack of leadership all around, that doesn’t mean it is not desperately needed, nor that you should be discouraged if you are intent on becoming a leader, and behaving like a leader. However, it does mean you need to be practical.
- Make sure you have a clear notion of what leadership means to you. Review the models, frameworks and the like, but relate it to you and your situation and make clear simple decisions. One client recently defined his own “leadership manifesto”. Good move!
- Make a commitment to finding time on a regular basis to do your leadership work (including thinking). Don’t just fit it in at the end of the day.
- Definite a small number of leadership goals. As a leader, in your role as a leader, what specific results do you want to achieve? My own preference is to view leadership as the drive for specific outputs, and these could be annual attitude survey results, or launching products. The job of leadership is then to influence that output to be achieved.
And please, try to keep it simple. Don’t disappear into masses of research. My bet would be you already know enough, you’ve just got to quickly distil it down to what you believe will be the most effective was to “express” your leadership over the next few months/years.
Go to it!
The Gautrey Influence Blog
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