08 Jun 2009 |
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Leadership Fundamentals The What, Who and How? By Chidi Okemadu B.Sc., M.Sc.(Nig), M.Sc.(Lon), CeFA, MCMI, MCIOB FI Team ltd, UK To discuss the fundamentals of leadership is to answer the question: what is leadership, who is a leader and how to lead? If you show me any successful civilisation, a successful world class company or any successful person past or present, I will point you to leadership that combined both fun and the mental. The fun bit is the passion that drives leaders. The ‘mental’ is the attention to details that produces the results. Leadership is not just a title that people acquire, by which they are identified. It is what you do. It is the action you take and the way your people (team) respond to you. It is therefore important to distinguish between the title people are conferred with either by election or appointment and what they do or their actions. It is known that each individual begins life with a head start in some area and handicap in other areas. Yet like most skills in life, leadership skills can be acquired by learning, observing, practising and rehearsing. No leader in life will ever lay claim to successfully ticking all the skill boxes. Almost all leaders surround themselves with people that complement them: those who make up for their deficiencies. It is all about people. Art Williams made a powerful case on the importance of being people centred in his book, The Coach: “If your vision is for a year, plant a wheat. If your vision is for ten years, plant a tree. If your vision is for a lifetime, plant a person.” To lead successfully, it is far more important to know how people live and respond to life than it is to be intelligent. The best way to find out about people is not to ask what they like about life but how they live their life. A successful leader knows his or her people. Leaders, who know how people live or work, add value to their life and work. Vince Lombardi put it succinctly, “The secret to success in business can be said in one word: ‘heart power’. Capture the heart and you’ve captured the person”. If it is the fact that to lead others, you must lead yourself first; it follows that knowledge of your people must start with yourself. In the words of Socrates: “”know thyself”. To be successful, you must undertake an in-depth study of yourself. Do you want to be the go-to-person in your sphere of operation; the two percent that makes the difference in other people’s lives? This distinction is not achieved because of how smart you are or by the number of academic letters after your name or by how hard you work. “The race is not to the swift, or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant; but time and chance happen to them all”. You must be in position at the right place at the right time. Right place, right time will not in itself impose a leadership status on you. Go through a list of successful leaders: Barrack Obama, John F Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Richard Branson, Bill Gates etc, they acted on their dreams and they took their chance. It is called the habit of going the extra mile. Leadership is much more than the art of acquiring new skills. Yes, you have to continually renew yourself without flip flopping on your values. The greatest gift a leader can give to the people is the gift of vision and the belief to see it through. Leaders possess a pioneering spirit. In a pioneering culture, courage is infectious and so is fear. Those who infect their people with courage end up separating themselves from the pack, hence the likelihood to pull people along. When fear is evident, it’s like pushing a rope. It is this distinction between pulling and pushing that sets you apart from your peers. Leadership is built on vision and driven by faith: believing in something yet to materialise. Belief is the phenomenon that breeds life into the vision. Regarding that which is yet tangible as an existing reality is an act of faith. The extent to which you lead is directly proportional to the depth of your faith. “With vision, people flourish, without vision, people perish”. Vision: the objective seen with your minds eye ever before it becomes comprehensible and tangible to our normal senses. It follows that those being led will need persuading to leave the comfort of their cocoon before being driven to the stated purpose or objective of the leaders’ vision. These transitions will one hundred percent of the time encounter a storm, if not several storms. But you must not give in to the curse of comfort. You will never achieve anything without paying the price. To achieve your vision; you must transit through storm, you must budget for failure. Storms are in all cases very discomforting to the body and mind. At this stage, a leader sustains the greatest loss of followers – the point of doubt. No one pays a price for an objective that presents him with no clarity. When your vision is clear, the price is easy to pay. It pays to communicate your vision with clarity. In communicating your vision, the issue is simply the need of your people. Their need is simplicity of objective, message and process. You will convey these by way of a clear plan. It does not require complicated manoeuvres. The simplest is the best and common sense is fundamental. People need to buy into this plan for it to be valuable. The best currency that sells your plan is your character and integrity, not the glitz of marketing. After all when you deliver your vision, it is nothing but a promise and will remain irrelevant if people accept it with doubt or suspicion. But for those with character and integrity; people will put faith in the value of that promise and galvanise themselves to achieve it. The analogy is realising that you do not choose an Engineer or Electrician on the basis of their skill or qualifications; you choose them on how much their reputation is developed. Leaders must possess as much character as intellect. Those with a great deal of intellect and little character are least suited for leadership. Character is a trait anyone can develop. Successful leaders are made not born. It comes from practising or developing successful leadership habits: 1) Vision/purpose pursued with passion, 2) Character/integrity that backs up your purpose, 3) Simplicity of objectives and messages, 4) a plan to galvanise and deliver those objectives. People who fail to plan, plan to fail, 5) flexibility and 6) focus (urgency) on the primary goals. Your vision and character embody the horizontal aspects of your leadership and are personal to you. The vertical aspects (simplifying objectives, flexibility, planning and speed of delivery) are aspects of leadership that your team brings to the table. Since developing successful leadership habits comes from practice; people only practice those things they know. Knowledge of the higher branches of leadership is only acquired by experiencing and studying great leaders. Just as our body reflects what we eat, our mind reflects what we read and observe; hence the perennial failure of leadership in some cultures and communities. Everything that goes through our eyes is recorded in our brain, forms part of, and plays a role in the leader we become. We become what we read, practice and think about. The mind is like the earth; does not mind what you plant on it, it just returns it. Knowledge alone does not produce great leaders, practice does -in the same way that learning grammar does not equip poets to write great poems. At the end of the day, it is being able to take your people to a higher level of performance than they would have achieved without you. According to John Lechleiter, president and COO of Eli Lilly; “About two-thirds of leadership development comes from experience, about one-third from mentoring and coaching and a smidgen from classroom and training”. The emergence of leadership is achieved through acceptance. This is why a vacuum in leadership appears in the absence of law and order or due process. The problem in trying to gain acceptance by machismo or lording it over others is that it produces a placebo effect, short lived and is immediately followed by disrespect and descent. As force is applied in leadership, acceptance disappears as quickly as it was forced. So how does a great leader gain the acceptance of the team? The psychology of the leader affects the led. As a leader, you must lead yourself first. You cannot take people to a place you’ve never been. So the best way to learn how to lead is to be a good follower. You have to serve people successfully first to gain their acceptance. Its’ like sitting in front of the stove and asking for heat before you add the fuel. NO!! You must add fuel before heating up. This is evident in all aspects of life – politics, business and religion. Weather you are leading (setting the agenda) or following (learning the ropes) there are basic precepts the art of which one must master: 1) The art of self belief - It is far more a guide to people’s action than their knowledge; 2) Believing on predetermined outcomes; 3) Control of self – out of control by you means in control by others; 4) Character and ability to inspire; 5) Building your people up; 6) Managing your time – doing the important things first and urgent ones later; 7) Playing to your strength. Never lose your temper – nothing undermines leadership more than the appearance of pettiness. I noted at the beginning of the article that leadership is embedded in your actions and the way your people (team) respond to you. I placed heavy emphasis on people because if you are leading and no one is following, you are just taking a walk. I will now turn your attention to the importance of action in leadership. Napoleon Hill best summarised the importance of action in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad: “When you have talked yourself into what you want, stop talking and begin saying it with your actions”. Persuading yourself that you can do something is a strong beginning. Next, develop a sound plan and get into action. The longer you delay, the harder it will be to begin. Seldom is a plan perfect. No successful leader started with perfection. They turned every situation into an opportunity. There is no perfection in life until you make the best of your existing situation. If you have a clear vision of your goal and a plan that is flexible enough to allow you to deal with unexpected obstacles or take advantage of unforeseen opportunities, do not delay another minute. Just getting into action-even if you do have to make adjustments later-will help focus your mind and channel your energies in the direction of your objective. Your future as a leader starts with a dream (vision). You must decide what to do about your dream; take action on your decision and back up your decision with determination. Indeed you need to breed in yourself a focused, winning-oriented mentality. Successful leaders sacrifice daily through daily activities. Average people accept the circumstances of their life through rationalization. They choose to be static, enumerating all the difficulties that they encounter while leaders get up and enjoy overcoming the issues they encounter. I will put it simply; to be good, you have to be bad; to be bad, you have to try; to try you have to start. Nothing happens until you get started.
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