The great John Maxwell says that leadership is influence and influence is leadership – this is so true. Whilst many leaders believe they can influence, a large percentage of them do so through positional leadership. That is, they are the Manager, and therefore will tell their team what to do, hence believing that they are influencing. This is not necessarily true, they are merely directing. When it comes to leadership, the leader must earn the right to lead his/her people through developing trust, especially if they are seeking sustainable success. Importantly, prior to being able to lead the team, they must be able to successfully lead themselves. Because all leadership starts from self leadership, and when a leader is able to successfully lead themselves, there is congruence when it comes to leading their team.

There are countless examples of leaders who ‘appeared’ to have it all together from the outside, and yet fell short in terms of their ability to influence the team and drive the results. A prime example was a leader who I worked with many years ago who found it very difficult to make decisions for themselves on relatively small things. They suffered from that insidious condition, procrastination. And so when it came to leading the team, they would constantly ‘advise’ their team to make quicker decisions, to ‘get on with it’, and amusingly say ‘stop procrastinating!!’ This, as you can imagine, did not end well, because there was an incongruence between their self leadership and approach, and the leadership of the team. And unfortunately the leaders’ credibility and reputation was adversely affected. It was the classic example of ‘do as I say, and not as I do’. Not exactly a successful blueprint for sustainable growth and results.

As mentioned previously, simply because you have been placed in a leadership role, this does not guarantee you to be a leader – you must earn the right to lead your people, because one of the cornerstones of a great leader is that people choose and want to follow the leader, they are not forced to. Great leaders understand that effective leadership of others begins with effective leadership of self, and effective leadership of self is founded on 4 core pillars – the 4 Pillars of Self Leadership: Continue Reading