Leadership-Be Out Front

One of my favorite quotations on leadership states, “Leadership isn’t taught.  It is caught.”  I can assure you that in my career as a self-employed business owner and as a personal business coach that there are several people who served me well as excellent role models of leadership.

In fact today, when I am in leadership positions, I refer back to some of those experiences to help guide me and make me a better leader.

Leadership-Think In A Larger Context

One of the things I have learned is that good leadership thinks in a broader context.  Leaders start by asking themselves, how will this impact my people or those around me?  But they go one step further.  They look at the impact on those above them and below them.

They look at things in the larger context.  They try to see everything in terms of the entire organization and beyond.

Leadership—Be Global

Good leadership has the ability to be global.  Leaders that are global have the ability to create the positive vision of the future that they and their team want to accomplish.  But in being global they also see how what they are doing will have in impact on other areas of the organization.

Or, if they are a self-employed business owner, entrepreneur or solo professional, how they are going to have to change and what other changes are going to happen in order to grow the business and have small business success.

Leadership Is Influence

As John Maxwell says, “Leadership is influence.”  You can extend your leadership skills even further if you have what I call a spectrum component to add to the global outlook.

The spectrum component is the ability to see in broad terms the steps, time lines and project management that will be needed to take the team to the realization of the goal.

Leadership involves many other things but the above are a start.  Start looking at things in the larger context.  This leads to more global thinking.  Provide a linear or spectrum component, or what I call, the “how tos.”

But in the end, your leadership will be as effective as your influence.  Leadership is creating in others today a future willingness to follow you into something new for the sake of something great.  And the great leadership stories are about just that.  Leadership is about taking a group of followers into something new and ending up with something great.