How Will You Develop The Leader Within You?

 

Image: pexels.com/Andrea Piacquadio

 

The bottom line is that if you’ve never done anything to develop yourself as a

leader, you can start today.

 

And if you have already begun your leadership

journey, you can become a better leader than you already are by intentionally

developing the leader within you.

 

What will that take? That’s the subject of this workbook. These ten lessons  contain what I consider to be the ten essentials for developing yourself as a leader. Let’s start with the most important concept of the ten: influence.

 

After more than five decades of observing leaders around the world and many years of developing my own leadership potential, I have come to this conclusion:  Leadership is influence.

 

That’s itnothing more, nothing less. That’s why my favorite leadership proverb is “He who thinketh he leadeth and hath no one following him is only taking a walk.” For you to be a leader, someone has to be following you.

 

I love what James C. Georges, founder and chairman of the PAR Group, said in an interview I read years ago: “What is leadership? Remove for a moment the moral issues behind it, and there is only one definition: Leadership is the ability to obtain followers.”

 

Leadership Is The Ability To Obtain Followers.

James C. Georges

 

Anyone for good or ill who gets others to follow is a leader. That means Hitler was a leader. (Did you know that TIME named Hitler their Man of the Year in 1938 because he had greater influence on the world than anyone else?) Osama bin Laden was a leader. Jesus of Nazareth was a leader.

 

So was Joan of Arc. Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy were leaders. While the value systems, abilities, and goals of all these people were vastly different, each of them attracted followers. They all had influence.

 

Influence is the beginning of true leadership. If you mistakenly define leadership as the ability to achieve a position instead of the ability to attract followers, then you will go after position, rank, or title to try to become a leader. But this type of thinking results in two common problems.

 

First, what do you do if you attain the status of a leadership position but experience the frustration of having no one follow you?

 

Second, what if you never achieve the “proper” title? Will you keep waiting to try to make a positive impact on the world? My goal with this workbook is to help you understand how influence works, and use it as the starting point for learning how to lead more effectively.

 

Each lesson is designed to help you acquire skills and abilities that further develop you as a leader. With the addition of each skill set, you will become a better leader.

 

 

 

 

 

Source: 

John C. Maxwell, 10 Lesson Developing The Leader Within You, pg. 14-15

 

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