Four Unexpected Ideas About Leadership
I’m a little late getting this newsletter out because I just arrived in Pohnpei, Micronesia, after a long 13-hour flight from Hawaii. The journey was incredible, as we hopped from island to island across the Pacific.
As you can imagine, the scenery was breathtaking, but the adventure was even better. Meeting new people and seeing the world while working is obviously a pretty cool perk.
If any of you are interested, here is a link to the location on google maps. It is a long way from NYC where I started.
And here are a couple of photos from my trip.
After a good nights rest and waking up bright and early (there is nothing like being wide awake at 3:30 in the morning), I thought I’d fill you in on what I’ll be sharing with my clients here in Pohnpei.
This is all part of a leadership workshop I designed for organizations who want to increase their leadership capacity, and I hope these ideas will be helpful to you.
1. Leadership is a Decision, Not a Position
This is an idea one of my mentors - Matt Church - shared with me and I just love it because it is so true!
You are not a leader because of a position you hold.
You are not a leader because you have a title or sit on top of a hierarchy.
And you are definitely not a leader because of seniority or because you’ve been working in an organization for a long time.
You are a leader because of the decisions you make.
You are a leader because you decide to be!
2. Leadership takes many forms
When I was in my masters program years ago, one of my professors shared an interesting statistic. To this day I’m not sure if it was true, but he said that somewhere around 85% of the CEOs in the Fortune 500 were over 6 feet tall.
I think it was a made up statistic, but he shared this with us to make a point about causation vs. correlation.
He then went on to point out that while it is interesting that leaders in the F500 seem to be taller, being 6 feet tall certainly doesn’t mean someone is going to be a great leader.
There are probably millions of people in the world who are over six feet tall but that doesn’t guarantee success at leadership because there is no stereotypical leader.
Leaders can be short or tall.
They can identify as male, female, or non-binary.
They can have high IQ’s or average IQs.
They can be fun to be around or boring.
They can be assertive or laid back.
Leaders come in all shapes and sizes.
3. Leadership isn’t a solo sport
This is a difficult one for a lot of people to accept because for centuries, human beings have glorified the idea that a great leader is an individual who is independent and strong!
We’ve come to love the strongman model of leadership and have accepted the idea that a leader is bossy, assertive, controlling, and independent!
When we put a leader on a pedestal and expect him or her to save us from all of our problems, we give up our power.
In my opinion, that is the wrong way to look at leadership!
Leadership is actually a team effort.
Whenever you see a successfully organization you can rest assured that one leader didn’t really make it all happen.
Apple didn’t become the biggest company in the world because of Steve Jobs alone.
Amazon might have Jeff Bezos, but that company is really successful because of many leaders.
The same is true for your organization. Leadership is truly shared among many.
4. Followers make the leader
I believe there is a simple way to determine if someone is a leader. All you have to do is look around to see if the individual has any followers.
A leader isn’t a leader unless they have followers.
And this really goes hand in hand with my last point.
Leaders are part of a system of other people and the leader’s value is mostly determined by the people they interact with.
So if you are in a leadership position, please realize that you aren’t really a leader until people want to follow you.
And this can really level the playing field.
If there aren’t any followers, you actually aren’t a leader - regardless of the position you hold.
Want more?
If you like these ideas and want to do more work to increase the leadership capabilities in your organization schedule a meeting to discuss how we can work together.
