As a leader your reach, your influence, only extends so far. And after that, you must rely upon another leader to carry forward your work. Do you recognise how long your leadership reach is, and what to do once you have stretched as far as you can?
Active Knowledge Question:
Do you know how to extend your influence as a leader throughout your entire business?
The Single Most Important Determinant
The single most important determinant of competitiveness and therefore the success of a business is the worthiness of its leadership team.
In fact, your weakest leader sets the ceiling to the success of your business. If you appoint someone to a leadership position who may not be your first or best choice, but merely an expedient or politically acceptable appointment, you have just set the uppermost limit for leadership and success in your business. Everyone will default to that new standard, or just leave, and all subsequent appointments will fall below that standard.
Worthiness Is In The Person
Worthiness in leadership rests within the individual person and their character as a person. Yes, experience and technical capability are essential, but their combined value does not outweigh the importance of character.
Leaders firstly and foremost lead. Moreover, their prime task is to empower everyone else to excel. They:
- Set and hold the direction for the business in leading it forward in success consistent with its purpose.
- Align all the people, resources, systems and process in the business to bring about a single focus and momentum behind the direction set.
- Motivate and inspire all the people within and with the business, including removing all the barriers to their participation, so that everyone is highly engaged in following the direction set.
Their ability to undertake these tasks rests principally in who they are as a person because it requires that they as a leader place all others ahead of themselves. There is no place for self-interest in a worthy leader.
The key traits you seek are, in fact, humility and gratitude. And it is through these key traits that a leader can uplift the capability of every other person in the business to their highest potential
Remember, as a leader you are there to lead, and that is a role of service not a role of self-service or self-interest.
Leadership From The Centre
We have been conditioned in business to think of leadership as ‘authority.’ Sitting at the top of the organisational pyramid and passing our decisions and instructions down the line for others to follow.
Authority is the weakest form of leadership, in fact, it is not leadership, it is better seen as a responsibility. Authority does not create a competitively fit business, that is, a business able to prosper and grow in today’s competitive marketplace.
The physics of leadership tell us that centripetal leadership is a far better mental model of leadership to hold if you want to lead a competitive and successful business.
Under centripetal leadership, you, as a leader, reside at the centre of your community. That community being all the people who work within and with your business. Everyone within that group moves around and inward to your leadership. They are better described initially as more of a group or crowd than a community, as it is only through your worthy leadership that they become coherent in a common purpose.
Your Reach
The strength of your leadership is finite. There will become a point, from the centre, at which your influence will no longer be stronger enough to support effective leadership. Think of it this way, extend your arm as far as you can, once it reaches its limits you need someone else to extend your reach. Leadership is the same. There will become a point at which the distance from the centre is so great that you need to appoint another leader to extend your leadership strength.
If you fail to appoint another leader to extend your reach, or worst select an unworthy leader, then your ability to lead will be restricted, and possibly undermined.
Centripetal leadership sees you establishing a network of leaders throughout your business all with their hands joined in pursuing a common purpose.
The Nature of Worthy Leadership
Leading from the centre and sustaining strength in leadership with worthy leaders are the first two traits evident in applying the physics of leadership. However, there is a third essential trait also and that lies in the nature of that leadership.
The quintessential role of the worthy leaders is to achieve harmony within their field of influence as it is only through this harmony that competitiveness may flourish. The level of harmony produced determines the strength of competitiveness. Harmony arises from the actions of leaders in seeking to create the environment in which competitiveness will flourish and the full potential of the business can be reached.
That competitive environment is best defined by the elements of the competitive engine that exists within every business and determines how competitively fit a business is and will be.
Moreover, it should be noted that competitiveness does not mean individual gain nor business profit, but rather the value which a business can deliver to its customers. As it is around customer value that businesses compete, and profit is merely an outcome of that capability.
As a leader, you must be conscious of how to strengthen your leadership influence throughout your entire business. Strengthen it so that your business can reach its greatest potential.
An entirely new level of performance.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
