Organizations often make the mistake of promoting very good sales or technical people to leadership positions without addressing the core issues of their leadership competencies. An excellent sales or operations officer will not necessarily become a great Sales Manager or Operations Director – as there is much more to being a leader than being competent at what you do. Organizations expect that when people arrive at positions of leadership, they will suddenly become leaders, but we all know it doesn’t work out that way. It is no surprise therefore that we often talk about a lot of technically competent people who are not very good at managing teams and leading people. A look around our organizations will reveal that a good number of our positional leaders have no business being in leadership positions at all, and a lot of time is spent by very senior leaders, human resources professionals and coaches to try to build leadership competencies in people who already occupy leadership positions but are already falling short of the expectations, at a huge cost and loss to the organization, and much to the detriment of the lives and careers of the people who they have to lead.
It is also interesting to hear people generally think of leadership training in terms of being focused on people in positions of leadership, rather than thinking about how to build leaders throughout the organization. I have even heard people argue that it is unwise to have too many leaders in an organization (what they must really mean is having too many positional leaders, as we will see below – can you ever have too much of a really good thing?). At the heart of this misnomer is the fact that most people are not clear about what leadership truly is, and how to measure it. On a personal note, my first experience in a leadership position was quite challenging, as I expect it would be for most 25 year olds given the responsibility of supervising 5 people who are all older than they are. I think I was really lucky to have soon learned what leadership really was and how to focus on that most important part of leadership. I didn’t become a leader when I became a Regional Manager, that actually only happened when I began the journey to becoming a person of influence, a journey which is continuous and will God-willing continue all through my life.
Leadership in the words of John Maxwell is Influence – nothing more and nothing less. The earlier we learn how to become a person of positive influence, the better we will be able to cope in leadership positions and grow progressively in our institutions. Forward thinking institutions and leaders must realize that influence skills need to be pervasive in the workplace for the organization to meet its objectives. Influence is about connecting with people, and getting them to achieve the organization’s goals. Influence matters and is applicable to entry level, senior, middle management, executives; as well as to sales people, middle-office or back-office employees. Influence is about making things happen in a broader organizational context – and that is exactly what real leaders do, irrespective of what position they occupy!
Quite an interesting number of organizations tout ‘leadership” as one of their core values or strategies but myopically think about it as something that people become when they attain a particular status or somewhere the organization gets to when it attains a position in its industry.
There needs to be a paradigm shift around what leadership means to individuals and organizations, and we all need to do a bit more to actually build influence throughout our organization and people, irrespective of their positions or titles. Early investments in leadership development and influence skills for younger professionals or even for students will go a long way in ensuring that when people do arrive in positions of leadership, they have already climbed up a few steps to higher levels of leadership. In fact, positional leadership is the most pedestrian level of leadership. Everyone occupies a leadership position – father, mother, husband, wife, teacher, trainer, director, manager, pastor, and priest – but how many of us are real leaders? Our people need to grow beyond their positions or lack thereof, and learn to lead by permission, production, people development and ultimately by personhood – the highest level of leadership where we sit at the height of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and allow our self actualization to reflect in all our relationships and interactions.
We have learnt that like life, leadership is a process, and not a series of events, and our commitment to building influence matters and needs to start earlier rather than later. So if you haven’t started, NOW is a great time!
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