1 Why Trust this Guide?

Benny had always wanted to be a leader. His problem was that the few times he’d had the opportunity, he’d not done so well. Benny generally knew what he was doing. He had skills, and he wasn’t senseless. On the handful of occasions he’d led a project or team, Benny had thus thought that people would listen to him, do as he said, and follow right along. But that hadn’t been the case at all. To Benny’s surprise, people just didn’t seem to respect him as a leader. They certainly didn’t listen to him. At first, Benny thought his problem was that he had no special title or credentials. Yet when he looked at others who succeeded or failed in leadership, the difference didn’t seem to have much if anything to do with titles and credentials. Benny wanted answers because he wanted to lead.

Leadership

Everybody wants to be a leader, each in their own right. At least, no one admits the ambition to be a fine follower, you know?  And that’s fine. Leadership is a great ambition. Everyone needs to lead something, if nothing else than your own life. If you can also lead your family and maybe rise to leading a team at work, then all the better. You may need to do so, whether you choose to do so or not. Many leaders lead by default and necessity rather than by choice. Yet if you really want to reach for the leadership stars to lead a business, school, nonprofit, or agency, or movement, community, or region, then have at it. We need sound, committed, and effective leaders. Few things are as satisfying, impressive, and important in organizational and social behavior as having the right leaders in the right time and place. The challenge, though, is having sound and effective leaders ready, willing, and available. And if that’s potentially you, then you just might benefit from having a leadership guide.

Guide

Leadership is, in a way, the most natural thing. We fall right into the habit first of choosing our own way and then, as we mature and grow in responsibility, of asking, cajoling, and at times pleading, insisting, or even commanding that others follow. Who, then, really needs a guide for better leadership? Yet what feels good in leadership, getting all full of yourself and your ability to boss others around because you are smarter and just always right, doesn’t always work so well. Leadership can involve a vastly more sensitive and complex combination of attributes, judgment, and skills. Indeed, leader attributes and skills aren’t even necessarily the essentials of leadership. Real leaders come in many different molds. You prove leadership in the outcome, whether people follow you to the point of accomplishing appropriate goals. So rather than treat the ability to lead as a roll of the dice, where you either have it or you don’t, or instead a set of readily acquired skills, consider your need for a subtler guide toward what might draw authentic leadership out of you. We each have the gift of leadership in our own way. 

Distinctions

Observing leaders teaches us how wide their forms and characteristics can be. No two leaders quite look alike. The differences can be most distinct when one leader succeeds another. Changes in presidential administration, for instance, can be like night and day along all kinds of measures, all emanating from the leader’s character, skills, style, and preferences for leadership. Leaders can prefer either flatter or more hierarchical and layered administration, more formality or less formality in communication, more rigid or more fluid structure, greater delegation of authority or less, more reporting or less reporting, more frequent meetings or fewer meetings, and so on. The differences are even noticeable when a protégé succeeds a mentor or a son succeeds a father as leader. One would think leadership style would persist in such a transition, but often it doesn’t. The mentor was rigid while the protégé is lax, or the father was kind and gentle but the son rules with an iron fist. Acquiring leadership attributes is indeed a subtle process because we each have our own unique character for command, authority, and rule.

Commonality

Yet as distinct as leaders are, observation also teaches that effective leaders can share some characteristics and skills. We may not all be experienced leaders, at least not of larger organizations and groups. But we all have experience under leadership. We are all, at one time or another, followers. And so we all have some familiarity with the attributes of leaders that effectively coax and command others to follow. Leadership isn’t entirely a mystery, even if a leader’s character can differ widely. We do have things to learn about leadership. Those things may not be nearly as straightforward and clear cut as one would hope. But useful leadership principles, strategies, and insights exist. You may not be able to pull specific levers in every instance to make your leadership work. But to know some of the levers that are available to pull, and to be able to sense when and how hard to pull them, may guide you into better leadership. Learn what you can about leadership as you enter the leadership field. You may pick it up on the fly, but doing so can be more painful than necessary if your naive leadership bumps along and crashes. Accept a leadership guide.

Growth

Leadership certainly involves growth. Rarely, you’ll hear of a born leader. But even a born leader has development to show. The better leadership opportunities involve a process of accession. Boards, for instance, typically choose their officers from among the more-experienced directors. They then move officers up the line from treasurer, secretary, and vice-president to president. The gradual elevation ensures that the organization brings candidates gradually along, allowing them to gain greater experience at each step. And that’s the point: leaders benefit from seeing leadership up close, to learn the proverbial ropes before stepping fully into the role. An unprepared leader can mean struggle or even failure for the organization. With leadership as in other challenges, the better course is to prepare, prepare, and prepare some more. If you can, make your leadership a gradual accession, not a jump straight into the circle of fire. Value this guide while pursuing other mentors and exploring other resources and guides.

Experience

Experience with leadership can also be a good teacher as to what works in leadership and what doesn’t. You have reason to trust me as a leadership guide because I have had relatively substantial leadership experience, although nothing too grand and instead a pretty good variety of mid-level roles. Those roles were of just the sort that you might enjoy in your first, second, and third or fourth opportunities to lead. I’ve led smaller and somewhat larger school boards, and smaller and somewhat larger nonprofit social-service boards. I’ve also led smaller and somewhat larger units within a couple of relatively large employer organizations serving thousands on site and with multiple remote locations. I’ve thus served not only as an executive leader but also for extended periods on larger leadership teams, in organizations with annual budgets into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, meeting monthly with other unit leaders directly under executive leaders. And so I’ve both led and helped other executive leaders lead, seeing how leadership works up close. I’ve also represented my organization on council meetings with other executive leaders, where we discussed our leadership challenges and successes. I won’t tell leadership stories in this guide. Doing so would make it too long of a book. But I have the stories to back up this guide’s advice.

Stress

Leadership successes and failures can also be good teachers as to what works and what doesn’t work in leadership. For better and worse, I’ve had both the successes and failures to be a reliable guide on leadership. I’ve started and expanded successful new ventures and made organizational leaders out of my units. I’ve experienced the upside of leadership. But I’ve also cut workforces and closed organizations, too. They say that we learn more from failure than success. From experience, I can say that the sentiment indeed seems true. We should all prefer success. Don’t go looking for failure, just to see what you can learn. But when your leadership struggles come, expect your challenges to produce surprising events that reveal even more surprising responses from those around you. And expect to gain from failure a clear sense not just of just how fluid, complex, and volatile leadership can be but also how little you actually control. Failure requires that you display different attributes of character, exercise different leadership skills, and draw on a different source or form of discernment. This guide will thus cover not only success but failure, too.

Roadmap

This guide begins with definitions of leadership, including what it means to lead, what it means to follow, and what are some leader attributes and skills. Get a good grounding in leadership. The discussion then proceeds to training for leadership, gaining leadership, and what leaders should do and not do. Have a practical sense of the path into leadership and basic practices of leadership. The guide then covers who should lead, whether or not you, and when you should lead, whether now or maybe better later. Some should lead, while others should not. And leaders have their own time to lead and time to step back from leading, too. The discussion then continues into delegating leadership, surviving leadership, and concluding leadership. Leadership needs not just an on ramp but an off ramp, too. One of the last chapters addresses leadership success. Although leadership success can come in several forms, you may have your own vision for what your success as a leader might look like. That vision just might carry you through. 

Use

Reading this guide straight through might make sense. Doing so may take you less than eight hours, spread out over a week in small bits. You can see from the prior paragraph that the guide has a start-to-finish order to it. But you don’t have to read the whole thing. Some of the chapters may be of special interest to you. Depending on your circumstances, you may, for instance, want to read the chapter on how to get into leadership and whether now is your right time for doing so. Or if you’ve already taken on a leadership role and need to get up to speed, you may want to skip those chapters and get right into the chapters on what to do and what not to do. If instead you’re moving from one leadership position into a bigger one, you may want to read the chapters on concluding leadership and leadership success, to broaden your vision for your new role. If you skip chapters, consider reading the bullet-point summaries at the end of those chapters, not to miss something helpful. And whether you read the whole guide or not, consider using the reflection questions at the end of the chapters of most interest to you. 

Obstacles

Please accept, here at the outset, a few words about obstacles to leadership and leader success. Leaders inevitably face frequent external obstacles to success, like changes in the economy, emerging technology, or the specific market or community in which the leader leads. Leadership is a lot about navigating those external obstacles adroitly, leading the organization or group through the challenges to the other side. Other challenges come from within the organization or group that the leader leads, like workforce skill and morale, volunteer or participant commitment, or internal conflict or division. Leadership is a lot about managing and resolving those issues favorably, leading the organization or group into a better stance or position. Yet leadership’s biggest challenge may be internal to the leader. An organization or group takes on the character of its leader. One way or another, a depressed, withdrawn, harried, and confused leader will project those internal issues onto the organization or group, just as an authentic, bold, innovative, and insightful leader will project those internal attributes. As a leader, your interior is, in other words, every bit as important as your performance. Pay attention to your obstacles, especially those internal to you, as you explore this guide.

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how far along would you rate your leadership development? In other words, are you just starting out, or are you part way or well along in your leadership experience and growth? Do you see your growth as a leader to be possible? Or even assured? How varied do you believe effective leadership styles to be? In other words, are all leaders doing the same or similar things, or do you believe instead that leaders have many different ways to lead? Do you believe that leaders are more often born or more often made? If born, then from where or into what? If made, then how? Would you want to follow a leader with a lot of experience or only a little? Would you prefer to hire a leader with a lot of experience or only a little, for an organization you controlled? Would you prefer a leader who has only succeeded or instead a leader with both successes and failures? Do you perceive your leadership issues more likely to be external to your organization or group, internal to your organization or group, or internal to you personally? 

Key Points

• Leadership is a healthy ambition given the great need for leaders.

• Leaders can benefit greatly from mentors, learning, and guides. 

• Leadership attributes, skills, and styles can differ widely.

• Leaders nonetheless exhibit some common characteristics and skills.

• Leaders aren’t just born but also made in growth and development.

• Leaders learn from experience, on which the author bases this guide.

• Leadership challenges and failures can also be great teachers.

• This guide progresses from definitions to application to concluding.

• Read the guide start to finish or skip around using the summaries.

• Leaders face external and internal issues, the internal being greater.

 
Read Chapter 2.