and exercises to develop yourself as a leader, to influence others in any situation where you are called on to lead, and to learn systemic thinking skills and apply them in a professional business context.
There are seven sections:
The first begins the journey. It starts with your vision – why be a leader? What does it mean?
The second section deals with different types of leaders and styles of leadership, explaining how when, where and why they are useful.
The third section starts to move away from the present and looks at vision, values and purpose, both organizational and individual.
The fourth looks at motivation and how to build it, also the dark side of leadership, the difficulties and obstacles.
The fifth deals with resources on the journey— the maps, guides and rules of the road.
The sixth looks at the guardians you will meet on the way and how to overcome them, how to build trust and be trust-worthy.
The guardians are not only external difficulties such as resistance from other people and organizational inertia, but also your own internal resistances and blocks.
The seventh section is about the skills and responsibilities you face as a leader and how you might get a business to fly in formation.
The last section is about passing on the skills you have learned to others through coaching and mentoring. It also has a summary of the principles of leadership.
There is also a resource section at the end with a bibliography.
Use this book to form your leadership skills, to develop yourself and others. Use it to stimulate ideas for dealing with management problems.
However, this book alone won’t make you a leader. I have a friend who is a fitness fanatic. He buys all the magazines, is a member of a well-equipped gym and has an exercise bicycle in his bedroom. Yet the only exercise he gets is when he lifts the piles of health and fitness magazines from bedside table to bookcase. He tells me he really will do some exercise – but he just does not have time right now. And he always seems to have something more important to do. He wants the health and well-being that exercise will bring him, but without doing the work.
Bearing this in mind, if you are ready, I invite you to step out on the first stage of the leader’s journey.
Why do you want to develop as a leader? What do you want to achieve? A leader is going somewhere. Why move if you are happy with what you have?
We move for only two reasons: either we are unhappy where we are and want to be somewhere else, or we sense something better and are drawn towards it. However good our life, we get used to it and then we want more; our imagination always soars beyond our present state. The energy to start comes from our conviction within, coupled with a push from the outside. This call to adventure and the urge to play with the unknown has given us our art, music, science and commerce.
Leadership comes from our natural striving to constantly reinvent ourselves. You do not need external permission to be a leader. Nor do you need any qualifications or position of authority. Leadership does not depend on what you do already. Many people in positions of authority are not leaders; they may have the title but not the substance. Others have the substance, but no title. Leadership comes from the reality of what you do and how you think, not from your title or nominal responsibilities. Leadership blooms when the soil and climate is right, but the seed comes from within. So the only permission you need to begin is your own. The moment you say to yourself, ‘I can be a leader,’ you have already rolled up the map, put on your boots, got up from your easy chair and taken the first step on the journey.
Irish folklore tells the story of a group of tourists enjoying a walk in the countryside. They had a map, but even so, by early afternoon, they found themselves lost. The sky clouded over, the wind whipped the leaves around their feet and the first spots of warm rain began to fall on their faces. They decided to make for Roundmarsh, which, according to the map, was the nearest town. After an hour, unable to see through the curtain of rain, they decided to ask for directions. Walking on for half a mile, the rain eased off and they met a local man walking his dog in the opposite direction.
‘Excuse me,’ said the tourist leader, ‘we are a little lost. Can you tell us how to get to Roundmarsh?’
The man stared into the distance at nothing in particular and considered the question very seriously.
‘Roundmarsh?’ he muttered. ‘Roundmarsh? Hmm. That’s a problem. If I wanted to get to Roundmarsh, I wouldn’t start from here.’
It is always easier to get to where you are going when you know where you are. In the words of Max de Pree, the retired CEO of Herman Miller, ‘A leader’s task is to define reality.’ The leader puts a stake in the ground and says, ‘Here we are, what is possible?’ Two thousand years ago, a Chinese proverb gave much the same soundbite: ‘Gain power by accepting reality.’ The ancients steal all our best ideas. But accepting reality by knowing where you are is the first step of every journey.
We need to ask three basic questions:
Where are we going?
Why are we going there at all?
How do we want to get there?
Then, as this is a leadership journey, we need to ask more questions:
What resources do we have to help us?
What are our limits and our strengths?
What traps do we need to avoid?
What do we know about leaders?
Who are they and what do they do?
What kind of models do we have for leadership?
Do we have a good map?
Why start the journey anyway? What prompts you? What draws you to being a leader? Unusual circumstances? A personal crisis? Perhaps a person has come into your life and changed your thinking. We all have defining moments in our lives and often a person will act as a leader for you. Sometimes we recognize it at the time, but not always.
I remember a seminar I attended a few years ago with Eloise Ristad, a marvellous teacher who was Professor of Piano at Colorado University. She gave workshops on music and performance anxiety, a big problem for many classical musicians. They are expected to give a flawless performance, ‘speaking’ with their instrument, which needs constant practice to master. The pressure can reduce solo instrumentalists to glassy-eyed paralysis, like a rabbit caught in the glare of a car’s headlights. Musicians are taught to play
