The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (9 page)

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 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.

Frances Hesselbein, founding president and chairman of the board of governors of the Leader to Leader Institute, observed, “Leadership is much less about what you
do
, and much more about who you
are
. If you view leadership as a bag of manipulative tricks or charismatic behaviors to advance your own personal interest, then people have every right to be cynical. But if your leadership flows first and foremost from inner character and integrity of ambition, then you can justly ask people to lend themselves to your organization and its mission.”

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, what should you consider? Three things:

Good leadership begins with leaders knowing who they are. In his book
It’s Your Ship
, Capt. Mike Abrashoff states,

Successful leaders work hard to know themselves. They know their own strengths and weaknesses. They understand their temperament. They know what personal experience serves them well. They know their work habits, 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.

In a speech on the value of honesty, Mark Twain once told this story: “When I was a boy, I was walking along a street and happened to spy a cart full of watermelons. I was fond of watermelon, so I sneaked quietly on the cart and snitched one. Then I ran into a nearby alley and sank my teeth into the melon. No sooner had I done so, however, than a strange feeling came over me. Without a moment’s hesitation, I made my decision. I walked back to the cart, replaced the melon—and took a ripe one.”

With all the problems we’ve witnessed in the banking industry, the implosion of Enron, and the failures of political leaders, I believe we understand what can happen when people treat their values like watermelons on the back of a cart, trading one for another. When leaders don’t have and maintain strong core values, their actions impact many more people than just themselves.

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.

Not long ago I came across a survey by Opinion Research Corporation for Ajilon Finance that confirms this. American workers were asked to select the one trait that was most important to them in a leader. While important to some, the majority of responders didn’t identify expertise, competence, or even fairness as most important. Here are the results of the survey:

Clearly, if leaders have a strong set of ethical values and live them out, then people will respect them, not just their position.

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.

Herb Kelleher, the former chairman and CEO of Southwest Airlines, began his career as an attorney. In those early years, he learned some important lessons about leadership. He says:

If you want to become a better leader, you must not only know yourself and define your values. You must also live them out.

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.
³

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.

L
ike 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:

The easiest way to define leadership is by position. Once you have a position or title, people will identify you with it. However, positions and titles are very misleading. A position always promises more than it can deliver.

I learned this lesson about Level 1 when I received my first leadership position in my first church. I mistakenly thought that being named the pastor meant that I was the leader. I couldn’t have been more mistaken, as I found out in my first board meeting. Soon after I officially started the meeting as the designated leader, the
real
leader took over. His name was Claude. He had lived in the rural valley where the church was located all his life, and everybody loved him. His influence was obvious as the other members of the board looked to him for direction and asked him questions regarding every issue. I could have
left the meeting and no one would have cared. In fact, I could have left the meeting and no one would have noticed!

I was shocked. In that first meeting and all the subsequent ones, all eyes and attention were focused on Claude, the
real
leader. The board members were not following me, even though I had the job title, the calling, the appropriate college degree, the office, the salary—all of the positional “stuff.” Claude had none of those things and yet they listened to everything he said.

My mistake was thinking that I had become a leader because of my position, instead of recognizing it as an opportunity to become a leader. I didn’t understand that leadership was given to me but not yet earned by me. I was a little too much like the driver in this comic
⁴
:

Back then I defined
leading
as a noun—as who I was—not a verb—as what I was doing. Leadership is action, not position. When I
arrived at that first church, Claude had been earning his leadership influence through many positive actions over many years. And people followed him as a result. Claude, who was a down-to-earth farmer, explained it to me later, saying, “John, all the letters before or after a name are like the tail on a pig. It has nothing to do with the quality of the bacon.”

I have come to embrace leadership as action, and I endeavor to teach that concept to leaders in conferences and seminars at home and abroad. One of the ways I do that is through my international nonprofit leadership organization, EQUIP, which has trained more than 5 million leaders in 160 countries. The organization’s trainers and I have found the number one challenge in developing countries is introducing the idea of leadership as action instead of position. Leaders in these countries often possess an “I’ve arrived” mindset. We want them to understand one of the most important characteristics of leadership: leaders are always taking people somewhere. They aren’t static. If there is no journey, there is no leadership.

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. Their position is more important to them than the work they do, the value they add to their subordinates, or their contribution to the organization. This kind of attitude does nothing to promote good relationships with people. In fact, positional leaders 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.

Often to make themselves look better or to keep people from rising up and threatening them, positional leaders make other people feel small. How?