I often find that many people confuse leadership with positional authority and power. We tend to believe that a person in authority or someone with a title is a leader. The reality is that most people in authority because of their potential to lead, however leadership only occurs when the person makes a decision to exercise leadership.

There is no correlation between position and the act of leadership. Just having a title does not make you a leader, leaderships is about influence. Title only buys you the time needed to exercise leadership, and in this time your influence as a leader either increases or diminishes. There is a huge difference between being a boss and being a leader…!

“The boss drives group members; the leader coaches them.
The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will.
The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm.
The boss says ‘I’; the leader says ‘we.’
The boss assigns the task, the leader sets the pace.
The boss says, ‘Get there on time’; the leader gets there ahead of time.
The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown.
The boss knows how it is done; the leader shows how.
The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes it a game.
The boss says, ‘Go’; the leader says, ‘Let’s go.’“

- Author unknown

People follow the boss because they have to, that is if they want to keep their jobs they do what the boss asks. People follow leaders because they choose to. They follow leaders because of who they are and were they are going.  Too many leaders today rely on their position to lead. How about you?

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“Rule #3: Leadership Is Confusing As Hell” By Tom Peters provides a list ways of being a leader in freaked-out times. These are some of the leadership tips that caught my eye…

• Leaders love the mess. “… There’s no mess — and no creativity, no energy, no inspired leadership.”
• The leader is rarely — possibly never? — the best performer. “… Leaders get their kicks from orchestrating the work of others — not from doing it themselves.”
• Leaders deliver. “If you’re aiming to be a real leader during the next five years, then you need to mimic the pizza man: You’d better deliver! For the past five years, ideas and cool have counted (which was important). What counts now? Performance. Results.”
• Leaders create their own (peculiar?) destinies. “… During the next five years, there won’t be room for paper pushers. Only people who make personal determinations to be leaders will survive — and that holds true at all levels of all organizations (including entry level)… ”
• Leaders win through logistics. “Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics…”
• Leaders groove on ambiguity. “…The next five years are going to be an economic roller-coaster ride. That means that business leaders are going to be challenged repeatedly not just to make fact-based decisions, but also to make some sense out of all of the conflicting and hard-to-detect signals that come through the fog and the noise. Leaders are the ones who can handle gobs and gobs of ambiguity.”
• Leadership is an improvisational art. “The game — hey, the basic rule book — keeps changing. Competition keeps changing. So leaders need to change, to keep reinventing themselves. Leaders have to be ready to adapt, to move, to forget yesterday, to forgive, and to structure new roles and new relationships for themselves, their teams, and their ever-shifting portfolio of partners.”
• Leaders trust their guts. “Intuition” is one of those good words that has gotten a bad rap. For some reason, intuition has become a “soft” notion. Garbage! Intuition is the new physics. It’s an Einsteinian, seven-sense, practical way to make tough decisions. Bottom line, circa 2001 to 2010: The crazier the times are, the more important it is for leaders to develop and to trust their intuition.
• Leaders trust trust. “In a world gone nuts, we cry out for something or someone to rely on. To trust. The fearless leader may (make that, had better) change his or her mind with the times. But as a subordinate, I trust a leader who shows up, makes the tough calls, takes the heat, sleeps well amidst the furor, and then aggressively chomps into the next task in the morning with visible vitality.”
• Leaders are good at forgetting. “Companies need to be forgetting organizations… Got an idea? Don’t dally. Go for it while it’s an original! Doesn’t work? Try something else. If that doesn’t work, fuhgeddaboutit!”
• Leaders bring in different dudes. “…Winning leaders know that their organizations need to refresh the gene pool. That happens when leaders forget old practices and open up their minds to new ones. That also happens — and more effectively — when leaders bring in new people and new partners with new ideas. As a leader, do with your people what Cisco has done so effectively with technology: Acquire a new line of thinking by acquiring a new group of thinkers.”
• Leaders make mistakes — and make no bones about it. “Nobody — repeat, nobody — gets it right the first time. Most of us don’t get it right the second, third, or fourth time either. Winston Churchill said it best: “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” Churchill blew one assignment after another — until he came up against the big one and saved the world. As times get crazier, you’re going to see more — and dumber — mistakes. When you make mistakes, you need to recognize them quickly, deal with them quickly, move on quickly — and make cooler mistakes tomorrow.”
• Leaders love to work with other leaders. “… Leaders are known by the company they keep. If you work with people who are cool, pioneering leaders who have customers who are cool, pioneering leaders who source from suppliers who are cool, pioneering leaders — then you’ll stay on the leading edge for the next five years. Laggards work with laggards. Leaders work with leaders. It really is that simple.”
• Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders. “Too many old-fashioned leaders measure their influence by the number of followers that they can claim. But the greatest leaders are those who don’t look for followers. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela. They were looking for more leaders in order to empower others to find and create their own destinies.”
• Leaders honor the assassins in their own organizations. “There’s only one reason why any human being ever makes it into the history books: because he or she remorselessly overthrew the conventional wisdom. Those are leaders. But truly great leaders, the ones who aim to leave a legacy, go to the next level. They consistently seek out and honor the people in their own organizations who want to overthrow their conventional wisdom. Great leaders honor the people who want to depose them, the assassins in their midst. Real leaders, repeat after me: All hail Brutus!”
• Leaders wear their passion on their sleeve. “There’s absolutely no question in my mind: Leaders dream in Technicolor. They see the world in brighter colors, sharper images, and higher resolution. Leadership, in the end, is all about having energy, creating energy, showing energy, and spreading energy. Leaders emote, they erupt, they flame, and they have boundless (nutty) enthusiasm. And why shouldn’t they? The cold logic of it is unassailable: If you do not love what you’re doing, if you do not go totally bonkers for your project, your team, your customers, and your company, then why in the world are you doing what you’re doing? And why in the world would you expect anybody to follow you?”
• Leaders know: Energy begets energy. “Every successful company, every successful team, and every successful project runs on one thing: energy. It’s the leader’s job to be the energy source that others feed from… Benjamin Zander said it best: The job of the leader is to be a ‘dispenser of enthusiasm.’”
• Leaders give respect. “… Care. Respect. Leaders care about connecting — because it moves mountains.”
• Leadership is a performance. “According to HP big cheese Carly Fiorina, ‘Leadership is a performance. You have to be conscious about your behavior, because everyone else is.’ Leaders spend time leading — which means that they spend time and exert ceaseless effort making sure that they come across with the right message in the way that they walk, talk, dress, and stand. Leadership is not only about action. It’s also about acting.”

 

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“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.” – Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit

As leaders we can be given accountability, we can given authority, but we cannot be given responsibility. We have to take responsibility. Leadership is a choice we make. The attitude of responsibility, is a leadership mindset.  We do not become leaders because we have authority and are therefore accountable. We are leaders because of how we choose to respond. Leadership rests on our responsibility, on our choice, not on our authority.

Leaders take accountability, whether or not they actually have responsibility. Great leaders are not afraid to take responsibility for things that are out of their control. Leaders don’t wait for permission or for authority, before they take responsibility and act to make a difference. When a situation needs to be improved, leaders make the choice to take responsibility. They choose to make different choices, to take difference actions and change life’s situations.

• Have you made the choice to take responsibility?
• Where can you take responsibility for changing?
• What are the first few steps that you can take?

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As leaders we often underestimate the power of commitment, there is something powerful about being committed, I mean being truly committed to a cause, to a vision or to a meaningful purpose.

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” – Goethe

The decision to act on what you’re committed to and passionate about starts a unique journey of discovery. You become more attuned to a new set of events occurring around you, you’re more aware of opportunities, many of these events and situation you would have brushed off and considered as unimportant.

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy,

the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)

there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which

kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

The moment one definitely commits oneself,

then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise

never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision,

raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and

meetings and material assistance,

which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”

- W.N. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

Where do you stand when it comes to committment:

• Have you made a decision about what you want from life? Do you have a set of goals?
• Are you committed to these goals?
• Are you taking bold action to bring your vision into reality?

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Photo by h.koppdelaney

“Time is limited, so I better wake up every morning fresh and know that I have just one chance to live this particular day right, and to string my days together into a life of action, and purpose.” – Lance Armstrong

The survey of nearly 1,200 managers and directors by the UK-based Chartered Management Institute has found more than eight out of 10 struggle to prioritise their work, with conflicting demands pulling them in all directions. Effective time management begins with vision and purpose….

It’s astonishing how many leaders fail to use their time effectively. Research by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal discussed in the Harvard Business Review article “Beware the Busy Manager” found that “a mere 10% of managers spend their time in a committed, purposeful and reflective manner” . In their article they research found that focus and energy  are critical elements required for purposeful action. They describe these two elements as follows:

“Think of focus as concentrated attention – the ability to zero in on a goal and see the task through to completion. Focused managers aren’t in reactive mode; they choose not to respond immediately to every issue that comes their way or get sidetracked from their goals by distractions like e-mail, meetings, setbacks, and unforeseen demands. Because they have a clear understanding of what they want to accomplish, they carefully weigh their options before selecting a course of action….. Think of the second characteristic – energy – as the vigor that is fueled by intense personal commitment. Energy is what pushes managers to go the extra mile when tackling heavy workloads and meeting tight deadlines.”

Effective managers and leaders have high levels of focus and energy which the article refers to as purposeful managers. As illustrated in the energy – focus matrix illustrated below, describing the four types of managers.

• How focused are you? Do you have a clear vision and goal?
• How much energy do you have? Have you made a personal commitment to the goal?
• Where are you located on the energy – focus matrix?
• Are you making effective use of your time…..?

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