Many still view leadership as a ladder-climbing game where the goal is to get to the top of the pyramid, so everyone else is below you. This is an ineffective image of leadership in today’s marketplace, where the greatest asset you can have is the combined talent and effort of every person working within and with your business.

 

Active Knowledge Question:

Draw a picture of the image you hold of what leadership looks like. What does this image tell you about how you view leadership? 

 

Leadership Is Simple

We can make leadership very complex, confusing and challenging, or simplify it to its essence. At its simplest and purest form, leadership is a circle with the leader standing in its centre.

Models of leadership imaged around a pyramid structure picture authority, command and control of all those sitting below. It’s premised around ‘just do as I tell you’. You can spin the pyramid 180 degree, but I believe the mindset behind it remains unchanged. It’s about who is in charge and who makes the decisions.

I do not believe leadership is about telling people what to do. Instead, it is about bringing their potential to the forefront and applying it with focus. Leadership is better thought of as responsibility and engagement.

Responsibility for the welfare of those people for whom you are a leader. And your engagement with them to bring their full potential to the surface, and that requires trust.

A group of people becomes a community when they identify a leader, who they all turn into and follow. This is centripetal leadership, where people follow a leader because they want to, not because they are told to.

And that act of wanting to follow makes all the difference to the degree and extent of participation and contribution gained.

Leadership is all about enduring success for those that you seek to lead. And if they are successful, then so will you be.

When you think of leadership as a circle, there are three circles in which you must invest yourself:

• You as an Achiever
• You as an Enabler
• You as a Catalyst.

 

The Achiever

The start of the journey of becoming a leader is to lead yourself. If you can’t lead yourself, how can you expect to lead anyone else?

And this journey commences with how you define success. If you see success as lying in wealth, power, and position, you will likely be led by self-interest, and the pyramid will be your go-to leadership model.

But if you see success as a journey of continual growth where you are striving to discover your strengths and talents, and apply these, then you will be better equipped to lead others to do the same.

I describe a person who can achieve enduring success as someone who has the Achiever Trait. Success can be the fuel of life. It is an enabler bringing your potential to the forefront as you strive for success. And it is a renewable resource that comes from within. It is a prize waiting for you to claim. 

An Achiever is someone who is:

• Self-confident but not arrogant.
• Strong but relaxed.
• Articulate in purpose.
• Clear in beliefs.
• Renewing through words.
• Grateful in life.
• Giving.
• Humble.
• Playful.

The Enabler

As you step out from leading yourself to leading others, your role becomes one of an Enabler. Your challenge is to bring the full potential of those whom you lead to the forefront and applied. You are the champion, uplifting each individual team member.

This requires trust, engagement and responsibility as the defining characteristics of your leadership, not command and control. You do not see your position as one of authority but rather a responsibility for the welfare of those whom you lead. Self-interest must not be part of your leadership.

An Enabler tends to be a person who displays the traits of:

• Courage
• Discipline
• Sincerity and Humanity
• Wisdom

And they work very hard to ensure they never see these traits within themselves:

• Cowardice
• False Pride
• Impulsiveness
• Recklessness
• Weak Compassion

Introspection and reflection are vital tools to strengthen your leadership capability to be a worthy leader.

A worthy leader is someone who:

• Invests themselves in uplifting the talents of others.
• Places themselves last as they seek to serve the business and customers first.
• Recognises and rewards the talents of others.
• Believes learning is important and creates a culture of continual learning.
• Listens to you and your ideas.
• Seeks to work with the best.
• Doesn’t take themselves too seriously.
• Takes failure in their stride and doesn’t seek to attribute blame to others.
• Seeks to win the trust and support of others.
• Has a positive attitude to life and comes to work with excitement for the day ahead.
• Views everything through the lens of opportunity.
• Give thanks for their life.

The Catalyst

As you step into the third circle of leadership, you are now responsible for the performance of a larger community where there will be other leaders and many people whose names you do not even know. Your responsibility has now jumped significantly. You are no longer enabling a few but have become the catalyst for the potential and performance of many.

Your understanding of the agents that influence and underpin performance is essential. Every organisation has a competitive engine that sets the floor and ceiling to its performance. A poorly tuned engine will drag everyone’s performance down, but a well-tuned engine will uplift everyone.

The seeding elements of this engine is the appointment of worthy leaders and the setting of the right purpose and motive. Get these elements right, and the other elements will begin to fall into place.  

The engine consists of ten prime interdependent elements grouped into three parts:

• Core:

• • Leadership
  • Purpose and motive
  • Relationships (employees)
  • Vision
  • Culture

• Focus:

• • Customer
  • Capability
  • Strategy

• Fuel:

• • Rewards
  • Barriers

You will recognise the title of these elements but what is important is to understand their ‘right character’. Recognising is one thing, but understanding and influencing them is an entirely different skill set.

In the competitive engine, we look at these elements to ensure they drive the greatest performance from the combined talent and effort of everyone working within and with a business. And that performance is to outcompete everyone in the marketplace by delivering a greater customer value and from which enduring and growing profits will be earned, among many other outcomes.

 

Leadership is bringing potential to the forefront and applying it. It starts with you leading yourself and then stepping out to enabling others and then being the catalyst of performance for a much larger community. Performance is not measured by profit but by the potential released and applied and the enduring well-being of the community you are leading.

 

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An entirely new level of performance.

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All the best in the success of your business,

Richard Shrapnel